Bathwater Blues: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  She thought she’d never get used to sharing an outhouse, but after a few days, knowing it was all that was available aside from squatting behind a bush out in the field, she got used to it okay. The key was timing her visits when she knew no one else would need it. If the others were taking a nap, or engrossed in one activity or another, then it was safe. There wasn’t much she hated worse than being interrupted while in such a… vulnerable position.

  So when a dark shadow fell across the tiny peephole, turning the darkness inside absolute, what she felt wasn’t fear. She clenched her jaws. She waited silently, hoping they’d go away as soon as they realized the door was shut. It was pouring outside, after all.

  Someone bumped the door.

  “I’m in here!” she called.

  The figure remained. She waited. A couple minutes went by. She sighed, chewing the inside of her cheek. Were they going to wait in the rain until she was done, she wondered?

  “I might be a minute…”

  Truth be told, she was mostly finished. She just preferred giving the outhouse a moment to… breathe, once she was. Natural or not, she’d rather others didn’t know quite so specifically what she’d just finished doing, was all. Was that so terrible? If they really wanted to use it when she was done, then… oh well, she thought. It would be their misfortune…

  Uncomfortably, she finished the rest and pulled her muddy shorts back on. She unlatched the lock.

  “All right, it’s all—”

  The door opened less than an inch and hit something solid. She paused. No one said anything. She pushed, pulled it shut, and pushed again.

  “Hello?”

  She pushed harder but it wouldn’t budge. She pulled it shut one last time and, with an ounce of irritation, shouldered into it. The door was more likely to break, she thought, before it moved whatever blocked it.

  “Is someone out there?”

  She pressed her face to the splintery, soggy, rain-scented wood and peeked through the inch of space she could open for herself. A narrow sliver of the guesthouse was all she saw. She crouched and put her eye to the knothole and saw only black.

  Then, like steam under a lidded pot, panic started to fill her tiny space.

  “Hey!” she yelled through the gap. She stood and put her lips to it, could taste the moisture in the air. “Hey!!!”

  She resumed her tired game of open-closey on the door for another minute or two. She almost convinced herself she’d managed to open it another quarter-inch, but she hadn’t. It was as though someone had set a block of concrete against it—or dumped a pile of them. She gave up.

  “Fuck off, whoever’s out there!”

  She stood panting for a moment, the inside of the freshly used outhouse rather stuffy and unpleasant. Her options weren’t many. She was sure someone would find her before the need to break out ever became a real likelihood, but…

  Then light returned through the knothole. Hesitant, she crouched again and peered through.

  If it’s Joanna or Lyle, I swear I’ll… I’ll…

  She could see the corner of the guesthouse and the field beyond it. The mountains. The rain falling in even sheets. There was no one immediately in front. Stiff with anticipation, she opened the door and hurried out, feet gulping in the mud, rain whispering in all directions. She spotted no one to her right, and…

  “Gah!”

  She spun on her heel, spotting something to her left, hands up for protection, and fell again in the mud, back on her butt. She picked herself up in an instant. It was there. She cast her horror-struck eyes upon it, trembling in the cold rain. It leaned around the outhouse’s edge watching her like a child playing a game of hide and seek. Except it wasn’t a child.

  It was a bathtub.

  “What the hell?” she murmured.

  She turned in a circle, knowing there had to be someone else, the culprit of this practical joke, but the yard was empty.

  “Who put this here?” she called out.

  Of course no one answered.

  She stepped lightly toward the tub. She stopped. Its feet were buried down in the mud, and all around the outhouse there were deep, round indentations roughly the same size.

  It’s not possible. It can’t be.

  Her arms and shoulders and knees and feet tensed, like a spring being compressed, and when she couldn’t bear it any longer she let the spring go, turned and bolted from the tub back toward the guesthouse. Halfway there, the front door opened and Lyle came out.

  “Lyle!” she said. She stood beside him, turned toward the outhouse where the tub still sat as it had been sitting, and she pointed to it.

  “Do you see that? By the outhouse.”

  He looked only for a second. “See what?”

  She gave him an accusatory look, like he must have been in on it somehow.

  “What?” he said.

  She looked back at the tub. It was still there. Watching. It had no face or expression, no mannerism, but she could tell it was laughing. Somehow only she could see.

  “Nothing.” She went to the door and paused, remembered her soaking, muddy clothes. She groaned. She looked one last time at the tub and wondered if she was losing her mind. “Nothing…”

  She went in.

  ✽✽✽

  The real thick of the storm arrived that night while they slept. Well, everyone but Addie. She lay wide awake and watched the lightning strike odd shadow-poses around her room, lively souls brought out by the storm dancing across the walls. Thunder always followed. The rain never quit.

  Addie twisted endlessly in her sheets. She wrapped them around herself, threw them off, kicked them to the end of the bed, pulled them over her again, rinse and repeat. She flipped this way and rolled that way. She forced her face into her pillow, as though she could smother herself into sleep. Nothing could comfort. The longer her unrest, the greater her impatience became, until she was on the brink of bypassing the pillow altogether and knocking her head against the cot’s railing instead to grant her a moment of unconsciousness.

  She lay on her back and grit her teeth. She inhaled, held it.

  Something kept her awake, kept sleep hidden how a magician might hide a ball under one of many cups. It was only a matter of finding it.

  She exhaled. She played her fingers along her ribcage, traced a line to her navel.

  The room lit white. Darkness reclaimed it. The air hummed. The sky broke apart in rumbling.

  Her hands slipped to the waistband of her shorts, underneath.

  She inhaled deeply.

  Maybe…

  Leaving one hand between her legs she pushed the other under her shirt to her breast.

  She exhaled.

  Maybe Lyle’s awake…

  She sucked her lip between her teeth. She imagined Lyle into her bed. Or was she in his? It didn’t matter. He was there with her. He smiled. She smiled. She undressed him without touching any part of him. Clothes removed themselves from their bodies like birds fluttering away into nothing, leaving them naked and together. He said not a word.

  Her fingers tightened and relaxed. Her breath quickened. Lightning showered its light into the room at longer intervals, as if even the storm was stealing guilty glances.

  Lyle bent over her. She lifted her head to kiss him. She felt his hand feel the curve of her neck, behind her ear. His body pressed against hers.

  If I went into his room right now…

  This was what she needed.

  This would help her sleep.

  She thought this in the back of her mind as Lyle’s weight continued pressing down and his hands suddenly found the places her hands happened to be. He felt her in just the way she wanted. His fingertips knew the perfect pressure. His breath…

  I could have this for real if I wanted. Just down the hall. He must want this the same as me. Even if… even if…

  The pleasure was receding. Lyle’s shape was lifting. The fingertips softened, losing focus. She pressed harder than even before to revive it…


  Even if I’m not good enough, he couldn’t turn me away. Not here. Surely he… he would take me over nothing at all.

  And it was gone. She opened her eyes in the dark, saw the window above her, the ceiling above that. Her hands sat limply where they were, her body unreactive. She managed to ruin even something as flexible as fantasy.

  “The truth, Addie.”

  A chill rippled through her body. She took her hands and clasped them reverently under the sheets where no watching eyes could decipher anything playful about them.

  “You can’t change it.”

  She sat up. The room was empty. The dark corners harbored no secrets. But the voice found its way inside. Somehow…

  “It’s high time you accepted it.”

  She got out of bed and looked around, got down on the ground to check under the bed. She crawled onto her bed, walked on her knees toward the window, peeking over the sill. Part of her suspected the voice was in her head, no matter how present it sounded in the room. Then lightning flared. In the field, under the torrent of rain, she caught a glimpse of it waiting.

  Go away, she thought.

  She peered into the black-as-tar night. She waited. Lightning stabbed the horizon and the field lit up in temporary daylight and she saw the tub out in the wet grass, just far enough away to be dream.

  Why are you following me?

  The tub disappeared back into darkness. Addie’s eyes stayed fixed on the spot where it’d been, saw a remaining afterburn image of it there. A low score of thunder followed. Then lightning again. The tub flashed into view. There was something inside it. The skin on Addie’s shoulders and arms prickled. She pressed her face so close to the window the tip of her nose bent on the glass.

  Flash.

  Something was rising out of the tub, pulling itself up on the rim.

  Darkness. Pattering rain. A low rumble.

  Addie wiped her breath from the glass.

  Lightning struck, followed by another and then another along the mountain range in the distance, and in their overlapping illumination, hazy and halo-like in the rain’s mist a naked woman stood beside the plotting bathtub. Tall and thin. At their distance, her face was mostly a blur through the rain. Her eyes were black.

  “Must I always remind you, sweet Addie?”

  The darkness sucked her in and Addie watched, glued to the spot. The thunder came again and never stopped. Constant. A hum. When the storm brought her back, her legs were moving, a slow and steady stride through the shimmering grass. Back to black.

  “Love does not exist for you.”

  It didn’t make sense that Addie should hear the voice through the storm, her window, and across their distance, but it spoke as though her mouth was cupped to Addie’s ear.

  “You’re not really here,” Addie told the approaching phantom.

  The sky illuminated and Addie screamed. She fell back from the window onto her bed, scrambled off its edge to the floor, where she clumsily got to her feet and met eyes with the face on the other side of the glass grinning back at her.

  “Did I startle you?” her mother asked.

  “You’re not here,” Addie said. “I’m losing my mind.”

  “Long gone!” her mother suggested with glee. “Remember this?”

  She raised her arms, flayed open like two gutted fish, and pressed them to the window. Fresh blood cascaded down like falling curtains. Addie looked away.

  “Why are you here?”

  Through the smear of blood her mother’s face hovered like a dark painting.

  “I don’t know. Why did you bring me here?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You thinking about fucking that boy down the hall?”

  Addie covered her face with her hands. The sudden urge to rip her own hair from her head bristled up like a weed, a willingness to do anything to chase the vision away.

  “Is that all you ever think about, Adelaide O’Dell? Getting your fill?”

  “How can I be doing this to myself?” she whined.

  Her mother’s words continued on. “What makes you think he’d want anything to do with you?”

  “Please let me go to sleep…”

  “What would your father say?”

  Something in the corner of Addie’s eye caught her attention. A red glow. She turned away from her mother toward the bedroom door, where a dark red light had blazed to life and was oozing in from the hall outside. Her mother’s cackling dissolved into rolling thunder. Or was it always thunder…

  A shadow moved into the red light and stopped. Addie struggled to take a full breath.

  “Is this what you want?” her mother asked. “Is this what you’ve been waiting for all these years?”

  A heavy sound creeped into the room, loud and deep and ominous. Breathy, like thunder of the lungs. The shadow in the hall stood still as stone.

  “Go to him, then. Show us why you’re his favorite.”

  Addie struggled to speak. Her throat was plugged with burning coals. The scent of something rotten fell over the room. She tasted it, spicy like black pepper, sour like spoiled milk.

  The figure at the door knocked three times.

  “Let him in. Let him in if you miss him so badly.”

  “Stop,” Addie chirped. “Go away.”

  The red light grew brighter, intensified. The shadow under the door grew with it, lengthening across the bedroom floor toward Addie’s feet.

  “Let daddy make it all better. Not like your mean old mom.”

  “It’s not him.”

  There was something standing on the other side of the door, something black and made of ash, with eyes like two ignited cigarette butts, working its needle-syringe fingers along the door, a mouth with worms as lips blowing smoke into the room. The door knob turned. Addie held her breath. She watched the door for what felt like a century, a span of time suspended in place by a cold-sweat fear dripping from her fists. When it finally threatened to open in on her she turned to the window, her mother’s grisly corpse watching with a loony ear-to-ear smile through a pale reddish gel on the glass. Choosing neither of them, she fell to her knees and dove to the floor beneath her tiny cot.

  “Addie, are you okay?”

  Addie yelped and pressed herself into the wall beneath the bed.

  The room was dark, the red light dissipated, but the shadow from the hall was inside. It stalked toward her bed, one bare foot after the other.

  “Don’t!” she pleaded. “Don’t!”

  It stopped at her bedside.

  She covered her eyes.

  “I want to go home… I just want to go home…”

  The figure bent and they placed their hands on the dusty floor. Their face gazed into the dark space where Addie hid and she saw them only through the gaps between her fingers.

  “Are you all right?”

  A moment passed where nothing happened. Addie watched the crouched person for a short while. Her expression slowly shifted from shocked to confused to exhausted. Then she stared a minute longer, thoughtless, braindead.

  “Addie?”

  She lowered her hands.

  “Lyle?”

  “Are you okay?”

  She looked from left to right. “I don’t know.”

  He offered his hand. “Come out from there. Tell me what’s going on.”

  She ignored his offered hand and climbed out herself. He stepped back.

  “Are you feeling—”

  “I’m fine,” she interrupted. She sat on the edge of her bed. “I was having a nightmare, is all.”

  “I needed to use the bathroom and I could hear you down the hall. It sounded like you were in trouble, I thought…”

  “Thanks. I think I’m okay…”

  “You sure?”

  The tone of his voice bewildered her. Of the several times they’d spoken, she’d never heard him sound so… interested? Genuine? Something about it made her feel ill.

  She didn’t answer him and they sat side by side for a few m
inutes saying nothing at all. She didn’t look at him. She could see him looking at her, though. Several times she looked toward the hall expecting the red light to be there again, or to hear the sound of her mother’s laughter from the window at their backs. But that nightmare had gone.

  “Addie?”

  She looked at him then. Lightning lit a square spotlight on them both on her bed, and the look she saw in his eyes was such that she didn’t know who she was sitting next to. He was like an anxious puppy in his staring. His hands were placed on either of his thighs. There was something he wanted to do or say but was struggling to find the nerve, she could tell. When their eyes met, he found it.

  He leaned in, eyes closed, and his puckered lips touched hers. She pulled back. Her darting eyes met his for a split second in the aftermath and she saw his face was a mess of regret.

  “Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she said. She shook her head, sorting her own thoughts. “Now is just not a good time, I think. I’m tired and a little… unnerved still. That’s all.”

  Lyle scoffed. “You must think I’m the biggest creep…”

  “No, I…” She almost spoke of her fantasy and immediately sealed her lips. She must be drunk, she thought, to even consider telling him that… “I’m really not feeling well.”

  “I must be insane to think someone like you would have anything to do with me,” he said. There was a nervous spark in Addie’s gut, hearing words so closely resembling her own thoughts. A total reversal of her expectations. “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you again.”

  He made to stand and Addie stopped him.

  “No, I’m serious. Lyle, I just had a very stressful nightmare. I’m not feeling like myself right now. I’m glad you came to get me out of it.”

  He was already caught in his own spiraling thoughts. Addie knew well enough how that went.

  “You don’t have to…” He stood from her bed. “I know how this goes. I know what I look like.”