The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  She turned it over in her head, half-distracted as she followed the others into the entrance hall. She was still considering her name, what it said about her, when Szabo turned down the other hall. But she stopped thinking about it entirely as soon as she realized where he was going.

  He halted at the narrow door at the end of the hall. “When they were modernizing Verglas lodge,” Szabo said, “there was one room they left just as it was. Behind this door lies a fragment of the lodge that used to be.”

  Hekla felt her arms grow suddenly heavy.

  “Is it haunted?” asked the bulldog.

  “Haunted?” said Szabo. “What does haunted mean? Shall we say rather that this is a special place, a passage back in time?” He turned the handle and entered the narrow passageway behind it, the others filing after him until the narrow space was too full to contain anyone else. Hekla was tempted to turn on her heel and leave, but when Szabo opened the door marked with a nine and entered, and the others trickled in after him, she found herself powerless to do anything but follow.

  …

  “What do you see?” asked Szabo, his voice hushed. “What do you feel?” He paused, his gaze sweeping slowly around the circle. “Breathe in the air. This is the air of the past. Be attuned. Something happened in this room that made them leave it as it was when the rest of the house was remodeled. What happened here?”

  “Someone killed himself!” said the woman with limp hair excitedly.

  “A ceremony took place,” whispered one of the identical men. “A dark one.”

  A flicker of irritation passed over Szabo’s face. “No,” he said. He slapped his hands together sharply. “No! Do not guess! Feel!”

  The people around Hekla closed their eyes, breathed in deeply. Hekla kept her eyes wide open.

  “Reach,” Szabo was saying, sonorously. His eyes, she noticed, were not closed either. He was staring at her, curious. Her effort to make her face reveal nothing made it feel stiff, almost dead. Does he notice? she wondered.

  “Let the words come to you from the room itself,” he said. “Then inhale them, hold them within your lungs, and let them slip through your lips.”

  He waited, staring at Hekla. She was not going to speak. There was no fucking way she was going to speak.

  “No one?” Szabo said. “Then be attuned to me as a start. Watch and learn.”

  He held his face in one hand, extending the other hand before him, almost brushing the shirts of the interchangeable men.

  “A woman came here,” he said. “She hoped to escape her life, but she found someone waiting for her—or something, rather. Here in this room. We know from what was pieced together by doctors later that she awoke in the middle of the night, the room deeply dark around her, and felt someone there with her. Or perhaps something. She could not move, she could hardly breathe. She felt as if something heavy had been placed atop her, a great weight, so heavy that she found herself unable to get enough air. Eventually she lost consciousness.

  “When she awoke, it was with a start, gasping, as if coming back to life.” Szabo lifted his face from his hand. “She went about her day, a perfectly ordinary day, then packed her things and drove back home. Only later did she realize that part of her had been taken by whatever had come in the night. That part of her remained in this very room, and she had no way to get it back.”

  He was silent, letting his gaze wander from face to face. “Attunement,” he said. “I feel the vibrations the events have left. You will too once you are properly attuned.”

  Perhaps I knew about this woman, thought Hekla. Perhaps I glimpsed the story years ago in some newspaper or other and subconsciously remembered when I came to the lodge, and then I dreamed it.

  She hoped that was it. She told herself that it was but didn’t completely believe it.

  And then a spasm flickered across Szabo’s face, as if he were in pain.

  “Something else,” he said. “Something …” Abruptly he fell silent. His eyes moved frantically, his gaze refusing to settle anywhere. A spasm rippled over his face again.

  A good performance, thought Hekla. An impressive—

  “Strange,” Szabo said, and his voice was different now, less theatrical. “My attunement seems to have shifted to a deeper level. I am being told that the woman in question was missing her leg, though I know for a fact that she was not missing a leg. And, even stranger, they tell me the prosthetic she wore looked just like an artificial leg but was also something else. Or, rather, someone else. What can this mean? Perhaps this is a metaphor for something real, the room telling us what it can with the language it has at its disposal? It is up to us to properly interpret what it means to say …

  “And now I see this ‘leg’ … unfurling? Yes, unfurling, and becoming a being of glass and steel. It stands beside her bed staring down at her. Slowly it takes on her form and her appearance—catch her!”

  But nobody was quick enough to stop Hekla’s fall before she struck the floor.

  She woke up lying on the bed. For a moment she panicked, thinking she was still in nine. But no, it was a different room, the furnishings upgraded, with an actual bathroom instead of a commode behind an odd half wall. Number five, her new room. A glass of water stood on the bedside table in a puddle of condensation. The clerk from reception was stationed a few steps from the bed, his hands clasped in front of him like a funeral director. The door of the room had been left ajar.

  “Here you are, then,” said the clerk. “Back among us.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “According to Szabo, you fainted. I took charge of you so the workshop could proceed.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She tried to sit up, found herself dizzy.

  He moved forward and pushed her shoulders gently back down. “Perhaps you shouldn’t go back to the workshop,” he said. “At least not until they are finished with what they are doing in that room.”

  “Why?”

  But the clerk did not respond.

  “I don’t want to go back,” she told him. “I want to leave.”

  “Leave?” the clerk said. He shook his head. “Miss Rognund, it is a little late for that.”

  After a while the clerk left, and she was alone. She tried to stand but the dizziness was still strong, and one of her legs refused to support her. She fell onto the floor, had to claw her way panting back onto the bed. She could not leave, not yet. But she would stay here and rest until she could.

  She closed her eyes. Even though it was still early afternoon, she soon fell asleep.

  …

  Her dreams, the few she had, were at first vague and indistinct, as if being glimpsed from too great a distance. They seemed vaguely familiar and not at the same time: more like someone was telling her about their dream than experiencing a dream herself. There were bits and pieces of the lodge in it—a version of the clerk with a different accent, the stag’s head now topped with a profusion of antlers instead of the two it had, a much longer and more meandering gravel path leading to the lodge—but all as if seen through a dirty pane of glass.

  And then, suddenly, it all came into focus. She imagined herself walking down the hall, a hitch in her step. She came to the door with the number five burned into it, tried the knob, found it unlocked. She opened it and looked inside.

  The room was empty. She stayed, hesitating for a long moment, then went out and continued down the hall.

  She walked past room six, then seven, then eight, then opened the door at the very end of the hall, then the door beyond that, the one with a 9 burned at the level of her forehead.

  Inside, lying on the bed, was a woman who looked exactly like her. She approached slowly, careful not to wake her. She bent over the bed and stared down, but no matter how closely she scrutinized the woman she was unable to say which one of them was the real her.

  When she awoke, she was in a different place. Someone was shaking her. It took her more time than it should have to realize that that someone was Sza
bo, and that he was sitting beside the bed, staring at her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. Szabo ignored this. “Where am I?” she asked, and when Szabo ignored this as well, she suddenly knew she was in number nine.

  But how had she gotten here? Had he carried her? Had she, asleep, wandered back here herself? Why would she ever want to come back here?

  “I knew you would come,” said Szabo. “I suspected when you fainted, and so I kept vigil and now I know for certain. I hardly dared hope for this. I sat and watched the bed and for a long, long while there was nothing, and then I watched you slowly come into existence here. I have been waiting for you, for someone like you, for years!”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “You have been chosen. You are attuned, not just your mind but your body too. You belong to this room. You belong to her.” He groped for her hand, squeezed it too hard. “Together we will accomplish so much!”

  She fled. Szabo hurried after her, at first cajoling and then, when it became clear she wasn’t going to stop, pleading and threatening. He grabbed her by the arm and she shook him off. When he grabbed her again she shoved him, got him sufficiently off balance that she could yank her arm free.

  She rushed to her room—five, not nine—and managed to unlock the door, step inside, and shut it again before Szabo could get his foot in.

  “Hekla!” he yelled, pounding on the door. “You owe me this! You owe this to everybody!”

  She shuddered. Rapidly she thrust her things into her bag and zipped it shut. Szabo was still pounding on the door, desperate now, back to pleading again.

  She came close to the door and considered what to do. Beneath her feet, the floorboards creaked. Szabo stopped shouting, stood silent instead, listening. Hekla listened back.

  “Hekla, are you there?” he finally said.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Come out, Hekla,” he said. “I want to make you famous.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I will make it worth your while,” he said through the door. “I’ll pay. Just to be around you. Later, once you understand, we’ll be partners.”

  “Okay,” said Hekla.

  “Okay?” he said, surprised, and she realized she should have resisted more before giving in. “Then open the door.”

  “I’m going to take a shower,” said Hekla. “I need to gather my thoughts. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  He was saying something else through the door, but she paid no attention. She moved into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, switched it over to the shower. As steam began to fill the bathroom, she walked to the far side of the room, opened the window, dropped her bag through, and clambered out after it.

  The car was where she had left it, though the gate was open now and there was a note under the windshield wiper written on lodge stationery asking her to kindly move it into the lot. She opened the trunk and threw her bag inside. She had just unlocked the front door and was climbing in when she heard a shout and saw Szabo rushing down the drive, his cheeks puffing desperately for air, his entourage scurrying all around him. Quickly she started the car, drove.

  She didn’t stop at all on the way back to the city. The whole trip she kept glancing in the rearview mirror, expecting Szabo’s car. But she didn’t know what sort of car he drove; how would she possibly recognize him?

  She arrived quite late, too late to go to her sister’s house and return her car, so instead she drove back to her apartment. In any case, her sister didn’t expect to see her until the next day. She was exhausted. She left the bag in the trunk; she could get it out in the morning. She climbed the four flights of stairs, opened the door to her apartment, stepped inside, and fell onto the bed. Almost immediately she was asleep.

  Did she dream? Yes, she dreamed. At first it seemed vague and indistinct, but in the dream she warned herself that she should not be fooled by this. And indeed, when everything sprang into focus and she saw herself walking through the paneled entrance hall and past the stag’s head, whose antlers now were so vast and ramified they spread like a tree up the wall and into the rafters, she was braced for what she knew would happen next. There she was, walking down a hall that seemed longer than the hall should be, stopping to open a door, looking into the empty passageway behind it, continuing down the passageway to its very end, then past that end and into a room marked with a blackened number nine, and to the side of a bed in which she saw, sleeping, unaware, herself.

  When she awoke, she knew something was wrong. She could not hear the noises of the city she usually heard, and the light through her eyelids was too dim. She could hear, if she listened closely, the distant crowing of a man’s voice, excited, triumphant. She felt something brush her arm. Or no, that wasn’t quite right—it brushed through her arm, leaving it tingling.

  Hekla, she heard him say, barely a whisper. Focus. We begin to glimpse you. You are nearly here!

  She stayed, eyelids clenched shut, willing the noises of the city to rise up around her. They wouldn’t come. Don’t open your eyes, she told herself. Don’t open your eyes.

  But, eventually, she did.

  Acknowledgments

  The title of this book (and of the final story in it) is taken from Marguerite Young’s massive and wonderful experimental novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. It is a book that I deeply admire, and that manages the confusion of what is real and what is imagined in a way that I find truly remarkable. I owe a debt of gratitude to Steven Shaviro, who encouraged me to read it and helped lead many of us through it with his careful notes and commentary. I could not have written this book without Young, Robert Aickman, and Algernon Blackwood. They, and so many other writers, taught me so much as I read them, and made my work better.

  I want to thank Sarah Evenson for continuing to so ably remake the beast and to expand the concept with the covers she does for each new book.

  I owe a great deal to the editors of the many journals and anthologies that published these stories. The stories are better for the careful attention they paid them.

  Thank you to my agent, Matt McGowan, and to my publisher, Chris Fischbach, and to all the amazing people at Coffee House Press who helped bring this book into the world. And above all, to all those readers who continue to support my work.

  Publication History

  “Leg”: Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto, Eds., Tiny Nightmares

  “In Dreams”: Conjunctions

  “Myling Kommer”: Tim Jarvis, Ed., Uncertainties

  “Come Up”: Alessandro Manzetti and Jodi Renée Lester, Eds., The Beauty of Death II: Death by Water

  “Palisade”: The Silent Garden: A Journal of Esoteric Fabulism

  “Curator”: Conjunctions

  “To Breathe the Air”: McSweeney’s

  “The Barrow-Men”: UNSAID

  “The Shimmering Wall”: Darren Speegle and Michael Bailey, Eds., Prisms

  “Grauer in the Snow”: Jordan Krall, Ed., In Stefan’s House: A Weird Fiction Tribute to Stefan Grabinski

  “Justle”: Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational

  “The Devil’s Hand”: Ben Thomas, Ed., The Willows Magazine

  “Nameless Citizen”: Darren Speegle and Michael Bailey, Eds., Adam’s Ladder

  “The Coldness of His Eye”: Christopher M. Jones, Ed., The Porcupine Boy and Other Anthological Oddities

  “Elo Havel”: Nightmare Magazine

  “His Haunting”: Ellen Datlow, Ed., Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories

  “Haver”: Strange Aeons

  “The Extrication”: Conjunctions

  “A Bad Patch”: Brendan Vidito and Sam Richard, Eds., The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute to David Cronenberg

  “Hospice”: UNSAID

  “The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell”: Michael Kelly, Ed., Shadows and Tall Trees

  Funder Acknowledgments

  Coffee House Press is an internationally renowned indep
endent book publisher and arts nonprofit based in Minneapolis, MN; through its literary publications and Books in Action program, Coffee House acts as a catalyst and connector—between authors and readers, ideas and resources, creativity and community, inspiration and action.

  Coffee House Press books are made possible through the generous support of grants and donations from corporations, state and federal grant programs, family foundations, and the many individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to the legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Coffee House also receives major operating support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Target Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

  Coffee House Press receives additional support from Bookmobile; Dorsey & Whitney LLP; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; the Matching Grant Program Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Mr. Pancks’ Fund in memory of Graham Kimpton; the Schwab Charitable Fund; and the U.S. Bank Foundation.

  The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press

  Publisher’s Circle members make significant contributions to Coffee House Press’s annual giving campaign. Understanding that a strong financial base is necessary for the press to meet the challenges and opportunities that arise each year, this group plays a crucial part in the success of Coffee House’s mission.

  Recent Publisher’s Circle members include many anonymous donors, Patricia A. Beithon, Anitra Budd, Andrew Brantingham, Dave & Kelli Cloutier, Mary Ebert & Paul Stembler, Chris Fischbach & Katie Dublinski, Jocelyn Hale & Glenn Miller, the Rehael Fund-Roger Hale/Nor Hall of the Minneapolis Foundation, Randy Hartten & Ron Lotz, Dylan Hicks & Nina Hale, William Hardacker, Kenneth & Susan Kahn, Stephen & Isabel Keating, the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, Cinda Kornblum, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs & Stefan Liess, the Lambert Family Foundation, the Lenfestey Family Foundation, Sarah Lutman & Rob Rudolph, the Carol & Aaron Mack Charitable Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation, Gillian McCain, Malcolm S. McDermid & Katie Windle, Mary & Malcolm McDermid, Daniel N. Smith III & Maureen Millea Smith, Peter Nelson & Jennifer Swenson, Enrique & Jennifer Olivarez, Alan Polsky, Robin Preble, Jeffrey Sugerman & Sarah Schultz, Nan G. Swid, Grant Wood, and Margaret Wurtele.