by Shane Staley
“Yes it’s that time. I’m here to collect my winnings. And to let you know you didn’t frighten me. I barely remembered your stupid prank.” He was being shallow and foolish, but he couldn’t stop. “And I wanted to tell you that you’re a dirty, nasty bitch who should be locked up in a sty.” He folded his arms. She stepped forward so that her face was inches away.
“You’re not from around here, are you, honey? Must’ve driven a while to get here?” Craig’s heart beat in his chest, he heard the rushing in his ears, and he was fifteen again. He tried to reply, but no words came. How the hell did she know that?
“Well, dear, your celebration is a tad bit premature. Look at the time.” She held up a cheap watch that was strapped to her wrist, the fat of her forearm oozing around the pink plastic band like leavening dough. According to the watch, it was 11:40 p.m.
“That’s impossible,” Craig whispered, and then it hit him. He was in Illinois. He lived in Ohio. The border between Indiana and Illinois was also the border between Eastern and Central time, a fact that had never been of much importance. The carny licked her lips. Her tongue was too thin and too pointed. She leaned over so that her nose touched his.
“I’ll betcha that dick is nice and hairy now, ain’t it, boy?” She placed her hands on either side of his face, squeezing it like a vise and kissing him with her fleshy lips, forcing his mouth open with the pressure of her hands. Craig tried to pull away but couldn’t, and he felt her breath forced into his mouth. It was sweet at first, but underneath the sweetness he tasted the cloying tang of over-ripeness, of rot. His throat constricted and he thought he would vomit. She exhaled again, forcing another breath down his throat, and then pulled away with an audible smack.
“I don’t usually kiss on the first date,” she said, winking, and Craig saw that her chubby visage was a mask, disguising something serpentine. Something elemental. Returning to the carnival was a big mistake.
He backed away and looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes in which he could die and lose the bet. His vision grew cloudy, and vertigo set in. He lurched forward. He needed to get away, escape and hide. Survive until midnight, so he could collect his prize.
The lights and sounds and smells of the midway blended into one dizzying collage as he ran, his feet unsteady. He looked over his shoulder. Was that her following him? Was she smiling? He had to run but his control over his legs was tenuous and he couldn’t seem to put distance between himself and the carny, despite her casual gait, stopping and talking as she went along. He bumped into a woman carrying a tray with pizza and soda and felt the cold splash of carbonation down his shirt, the hot splatter of tomato sauce down his arm. He continued on.
He couldn’t go much farther. The bitch must have poisoned him with her rancid breath. Then he saw them, rows of port-a-potties, bright blue plastic cubicles rising like a contingent of soldiers. I’ll be safe there, he thought, locked inside. He headed toward them, afraid to look back, and stumbled inside one. The door closed, and he engaged the locking mechanism. Exhausted, sweat dribbling down his face, his heart pounding too fast, he sat on the toilet.
The stench inside was horrible, a mix of urine and feces and something more putrid, like a dead body. He leaned back against the wall of the portable latrine, willing himself to calm down. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes.
Then the door opened, the locking mechanism ineffectual, and there she was. She stepped inside, squeezing her bulk along the sides of the doorway, and shut the door.
“Well, well, well,” she said, “look what we have here. You know, you really should take off your pants before you take a shit.” She laughed. Craig’s heartbeat quickened and a thin line of pain pulsed in his forehead. She moved closer and bent down.
“No,” Craig whispered, “please. I’ll do anything.” His voice was weak, a muffled wheeze. The carny paused and stood up, rubbing her fat fingers along her chin.
“Anything?” She smiled. “Are you sure, honey?” Craig couldn’t speak. He nodded. “Okay. Double or nothing, for old time’s sake.” She took her little pad from the pouch at her waist and wrote something. Then she leaned over and whispered in Craig’s ear.
His eyes widened and he moaned. No, she had to be joking. Not that. She couldn’t be serious. Another sharp burst of pain sizzled along his temple, and he thought he would die right there. It passed, but he could hardly breathe.
“Better hurry,” the carny said. “Time’s running out.” What else could he do, she had him trapped. He nodded his assent to her proposition. She tucked the paper into his pants pocket, documenting the terms of their new wager, and he watched as she left. The game was on.
* * *
The phone call came four days later, as Craig lay on the couch, watching a fly crawl across the ceiling, a miniscule speck of life in a sea of white. He looked at the piece of paper, a date scrawled across it, and then at his watch. Today was the day, just as the carny had written. He picked up the phone.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was flat.
“Hello, Mr. Junkins?”
“Speaking.”
“Mr. Junkins, this is Sergeant Elbridge. Of the Old Madison Police Department. In Connecticut.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, well, I’m afraid I have bad news, Mr. Junkins.” There was a pause. “There was a car accident last night. Your wife and daughters were involved. All three died, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”
Craig was quiet. Just like the fat carny said. Even prepared, it was shocking to hear. He looked at the paper again, the familiar rage bubbling. Damn her. Then something clicked.
“Did you say last night?” His heart beat faster.
“Yes, last night. They were coming home from a movie. Early indications are it was a drunk driver.”
“Sergeant, this is very important. Did they die last night?”
“Well, yes, sir. Both your daughters died instantaneously, at about 10:37 p.m. Your wife died on the way to the hospital. 11:06. Does that matter?” There was no answer. “Sir, are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m still here. I’ll be flying out there soon. Thank you.” He hung up and looked at the slip of paper. The carny had been wrong. By a few hours. They had died yesterday, not today. He had won. He had beaten her. He smiled a victory smile.
He’d fly out to Connecticut, eventually. But first, he had a bet to collect on. He went to find the carnival schedule.
Splotch of Red
Samuel Marzioli
Neglect had fallen over the flora of Mr. Lomax’s front yard, leaving trees barren and tawny, flowers shriveled, and the grass a patchwork of yellows. But more curious was the old man standing in the middle of the lawn. Ellen slowed as she passed him on the sidewalk. He didn’t move or speak, just stared into the various curtain-shrouded windows, wavering on legs that seemed taxed by the effort of standing. There was a hint of despair about him—or at the very least a tinge of confusion—that led her to believe he was lost.
She came to a halt, considered him a moment. “Excuse me, sir. Are you okay?” she said at last.
The old man made a slothful turn, exposing the crosshatch wrinkles lining his face. His hair was near transparent, enough to expose a liver-spotted scalp. And as she ventured closer, the stink of mothballs, sweat and just a touch of urine exuded from his clothing.
“Do you know the person who lives here?” he said, his voice deep and slurred.
“Yes, this is Mr. Lomax’s house.”
“A relative? A friend of yours, perhaps?”
“Not really, just a neighbor.”
He nodded knowingly and grinned, exposing the rot of his remaining teeth. “I see. As I always say, you can choose to avoid bad family, but bad neighbors are ubiquitous.”
“Oh, Mr. Lomax isn’t so bad.”
“He’s a thief!” the old man shouted, then spun around and stormed off. Once on the sidewalk, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his brown checked blazer, knocking an envelope loose.
>
Ellen hurried over and scooped it up. “Wait!”
Before she could hand it over, her eyes were hooked by a shimmering red “R” that seemed to pulse from the corner of the envelope. It was deformed in some indistinct way and yet elegant in its own right. She stared, transfixed, as it danced on the paper in holographic fashion.
The old man snatched it away.
“Thank you, young lady. Good day,” he said, and hobbled off.
* * *
Ellen stepped into her parents’ house, still bristling over her strange encounter with the old man. Though she was all but certain it boiled down to some dispute over the way Mr. Lomax kept his property in disarray, the oddity of it proved too hard to ignore. She kicked off her shoes by the entrance, fished out her cell phone and flopped down on the sofa with a lazy flourish.
A few seconds after she dialed, a voice on the other line said, “Hello?”
“Hi, Mr. Lomax? This is Ellen from three houses down.”
“As if I could forget! How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said, smoothing her hair behind her ears. “I was just calling to see how you guys are doing.”
“Can’t complain. We’re just about to sit down for dinner. How about you? How are classes going? I heard you’re at Cal State-Berkeley now?”
“Right. Classes are tough, but I love everything about that city.”
“That’s great! Good to hear it. Hey, you know, it’s funny you should call. I don’t suppose you’re back in Sacramento?”
“Yeah, staying with my parents.”
“Well, Eric and I are going out of town for the next few days starting tomorrow, and I could really use someone to look after the house. You interested?”
There was a lengthy pause.
He pressed on. “I’ve already scoured my address book for takers and came up empty. You know I wouldn’t spring this on you if you weren’t my last hope.”
Ellen laughed. “Yeah, sure, of course I can.”
“Great!”
After exchanging a few more pleasantries, he gave her the details. Once Ellen hung up, she rolled her eyes and smiled. It was hard to say no to Mr. Lomax. He was, and always had been, her charity case.
When Eric was only six, Mrs. Lomax had disappeared. After a brief investigation by the police, it was written off as a domestic issue, the assumption being she’d skipped town for bigger, better things—and possibly a brand-new lover. As for Mr. Lomax himself, he was a mail carrier, a job that sucked up more than the 9 to 5 one found him pounding the sun-baked streets. Without Ellen to babysit, he and Eric would have been lost. In that regard, it seemed, some things never changed.
Still, the idea of being in their house again wouldn’t be so bad. In fact, it piqued her interest. For the first time in years she thought about the Room again. Somewhere inside her, the wilted remains of that old obsession re-bloomed.
* * *
The following afternoon, Ellen got ready in a hurry. The whole time she thought about her old high school days babysitting Eric Lomax. He had always been a rambunctious child, addicted to video games, mad about dinosaurs and Transformers, and about as normal as could be. Mr. Lomax, on the other hand, was anything but normal.
She remembered how he used to come home in the evenings, a pouch stuffed with mail slung across his shoulders. He’d retreat down the hallway to the Room without a word, slink through a narrow gap that ensured the interior wasn’t revealed, and shut the door behind him with a resounding clack. Five minutes later he’d emerge, the pouch empty and his face beatific, as if a weight had rolled off more than just his shoulders. It was all so peculiar and, especially among the mundanity of homework and long-hours babysitting, maddeningly curious.
After she dressed, she trailed to the kitchen. With her parents already at work, the house was taken by a pin-drop hush, save for the bump and thrum of the refrigerator. She found a note by her mother on the countertop that read, “While you were sleeping your summer away, Mr. Lomax came by and dropped this off!” An arrow was drawn to point to a house key resting by the note’s side.
Ellen slipped it in her pocket.
She made herself a bowl of cereal, which she ate with ferocious indifference. Now that the Room obsession had resurfaced, it was all she could think about. When she left her parents’ place, the image of the Room’s door came to the forefront of her mind, that three-inch barrier of solid core wood. And again, she wracked her brain trying to figure out what was behind it.
* * *
The Lomax house was a single-story track home, similar to Ellen’s parents’, but for a reversed floor plan. It was painted avocado green and accented by a dark wood trim, which she’d always liked because it reminded her of mint chocolate chip ice cream. She swept inside and took in the quiet of the empty house in sidelong glances.
As expected, it was a mess. Eric’s action figures strewed the floor, prostrate and broken, like the end result of some imaginary war of toys. The carpet was filthy, dotted with dirt and food crumbs. And even a few of Mr. Lomax’s things—mostly jackets and shirts—hung over chairs and sat upon tabletops, as if the man had never heard of hangers.
Ellen tidied up a bit, but only enough to ease her guilt for what she had planned next. It didn’t take long before she gave up all pretense and began searching everywhere for the key to the Room. No drawer remained unruffled, no dark place left unexposed, no private space spared intrusion. She even checked within the vents, searched for loose bricks in the fireplace, and hidden hollows within the walls.
All came to nothing.
While she searched, she recalled the handful of theories she’d thought up over the years to explain Mr. Lomax’s strange behavior. The simplest was that he was the proverbial Nigerian prince behind a snail-mail confidence scam. Or that he was the originating link in a chain letter hustle. But her favorite was that his wife hadn’t really gone missing at all. That she was buried beneath the floorboards of the Room, hidden under a mountain of letters.
She didn’t seriously believe any of them, not really. Whatever Mr. Lomax had been up to was probably far more mundane than anything she imagined. She shuddered at the thought that the Room was full of mail-order porn, a far more reasonable answer for a lonely, single parent. And yet the pull of the Room wasn’t diminished by this fact.
She saved the kitchen for last. In the back of her brain she seemed to recall Mr. Lomax heading there every night without fail, for reasons other than dinner. And it seemed as good a place as any to hide a key.
She made short work of the cupboards, taking out pots and pans and cups and plates, shuffling through the pages of cookbooks, checking under spices and canned goods. When those places were exhausted, she rounded the table to the microwave mounted above the stovetop, stretched out on tiptoes to slide her hand into the cupboard above it.
And then—
“Holy shit!” she said, as she brought the key to eye level.
It pulsed against her fingers to the rhythm of her heartbeat. Everything inside her told her to run, to settle the matter once and for all. Nevertheless, she forced casual into her stroll as she neared the hallway, giving in and bursting toward the Room only when there were a few steps left.
The key burned her finger with a phantom surge of heat. As it slid into the lock, an indecent shiver dashed up her spine, raising the hairs on her arms. She twisted the doorknob and threw the door open—a triumphant push that made it crash against the wall.
Closet-dark obscured the corners of the Room. The tepid air reeked of mildewed paper, and there was a slapdash ocean of letters piled to the ceiling. On the wall beside the doorway, a dress hung on a nail. Below it, several pictures of Mrs. Lomax stood upon a small table, fanned out in a half circle, a sort of makeshift memorial. But there was no smell of corpse, no unseemly stacks of cash, lists of bank account numbers, or even porno magazines. It didn’t make sense.
She stooped and picked up a letter from the ground. It wasn’t addressed to Mr. Lomax or an
yone in his family, and the metered postage indicated a date four years previous. Strangest of all, the “from” corner glimmered with a red inked “R,” written with the shaky flourish of an ancient hand. The same as the one on the envelope the old man had dropped the previous day. She swam through the clutter, examining dozens of letters in turn. Many of the addressees were duplicates, dozens to the same name, sometimes more. But on every one, the “R” was constant, glaring like a beacon.
The connection was baffling. Or was it as simple as it seemed? She pictured the old man sending stacks of angry letters to men and women throughout the city, lamenting the current state of fashion, declining morals, or whatever misanthropic old-timers worried about. And then along came Mr. Lomax, scooping them up before they could arrive at their destination, and hiding them here. But why? And for what?
Her curiosity burned like a furnace. She dug a finger into the corner of an envelope’s fold, ripped a jagged line, and then unfolded the stiff white sheet inside.
“Dear Mr. Taylor,” she read … and then there was nothing. Her eyes trailed down the page and stopped on a shape. A splotch of red as thick as a thumbnail, with sinewy threads spiraling outward in a maze. She followed the topmost line, wrapping eyes around each elegant curve, deeper and deeper, until she struck the middle.
A pinpoint of black emerged, blurry at first, as if it were shielded by tempered glass. The larger it grew the clearer it became, until it pressed behind the shape like an eclipse. It was an eye: black sclera etched with spiraled veins, and in the center the pupil shone like a red dwarf sun.
She couldn’t draw her gaze away. The needle pain that now pushed into her mind seemed to simultaneously anchor her in place and keep her eyelids pried. The Room shuddered. All the color ebbed, leaving behind a dreary, pervading gray. Then the edges of the pupil exploded from the page and enclosed her.