Fountain Dead

by Theresa Braun

  Since he didn’t correct her, Emma figured she’d gotten it right.

  “I don’t gather why you need me,” he said, reaching into his trousers for his pipe.

  “In a day or two, we’ll move her to your room. After she gets accustomed to you coming in here, that is. We’ll tend to her together.”

  “And then what? She can’t be stayin’ here forever. You goin’ to put her on the street? Or send her to live in one of ’em camps her people are confined to? Huh?”

  The woman in the bed stirred at the raising of Jonathan’s voice.

  “I don’t know. Might you help me sort that out?” Emma touched the patient’s arm and shushed her. “It’s all right.”

  At the awareness of Jonathan putting the flame to the tobacco, the patient’s head sunk into the pillow and the creases on her face softened.

  “You realize she probably ain’t got no idea what you’re even sayin’?”

  “What do you want from me?” Emma asked, her voice agitated.

  He looked as if he might pose a philosophical riddle for her to answer, but then massaged his brow. “How ‘bout some extra blankets, seein’ as I’m fittin’ to be sleepin’ on the floor in my quarters?”

  Moisture caught at the back of Emma’s throat as she nodded.

  Summer 1988

  Without asking for permission for once, Mark declared his taking off on foot to find an arcade. The color must’ve drained from his face because Mom touched his cheek and asked if he was feeling all right. When he explained his need to get some air and his blood moving, she agreed to his wandering around town.

  The neighboring homes, both historical and needing repair, and newer ones seeming somehow just as old, were eerily quiet.

  Mark was the Bionic Man until he’d put enough distance between his himself and the house, which was when he slowed down. Convincing himself his real life was just a watching of some supernatural movie, he was temporarily brainwashed into thinking none of it was real. And, how could it be in broad daylight? He’d read about the effects of chemicals on the brain. With all the paint cans, turpentine, and whatever else was up in the garage, there was no telling what might’ve messed with his head.

  Spotting the bowling alley on the next block, he resolved to venture inside. Sure enough, several video games huddled at one end.

  Mark towered his quarters, which had weighed down his shorts, near Pac Man’s monitor, his favorite game. The elastic waistband wasn’t what it used to be, threatening reckless indecent exposure. He’d already achieved his indecent exposure quota at home whenever he showered and Tausha needed to pee. Quite possibly she enjoyed flushing the toilet and sending him a blast of cold water. On multiple occasions, she’d seen more of him than he’d bargained for. Not that she cared, but he did. Human decency. Not everyone has it.

  Once Mark plunked the coin into the slot, he paused before pressing the start button. Player Hexx’s high score strobed its victory at him.

  After adapting to the wear and tear of the controls, Mark would have the machine bending to his will. His guy was about to annihilate a crowd of blinking ghosts. Soon his initials would be boasting his domination.

  Several levels later, only a couple of quarters were left standing.

  In his periphery, someone lingered, scoping out Mark’s progress. Only a few thousand points away from the high score, the slick of perspiration caused his palm to lose its grip. It was much easier to be in the zone without an audience, and he could feel his groove literally slipping away. The split second delay was equal to a musician never falling back in tempo.

  Mark forced the joystick right to avoid the rapidly pursuing ghosts. A millisecond too slow, his Pac Man bleeped and spun in defeat.

  Mark shut his eyes, cursing himself. When he confronted the monitor, a digital Game Over mocked him.

  His hand still clutched the joystick, as if a glitch in the game might load a bonus round. However, staring into the refrigerator never changed its contents. Nor did staring at the screen. Mark needed to accept his losing status. A funeral dirge played in his head.

  “Shit! I almost had it.” Mark pushed his hair back with both hands.

  “You done?” The kid next to him leaned a tan hand on the side panel of the machine. He had straggly black hair and deep hazel eyes.

  “Chill, dude.”

  “Too bad, man. Better luck next time.” Crooked teeth poked from the kid’s grin. “Or not.”

  “Let’s see you beat that, hot shot.” Mark gestured at Hexx’s record.

  The boy blew out air, a thumb aimed at his chest. “Hate to break it to you, but that’s me.”

  “Yeah, right. Prove it.”

  Dropping a couple of coins into the slots, the boy pointed to the blinking Player 2 button. “We’ll play. I doubt you’ll win, though.”

  “You’re on.” Without checking his watch or considering dinnertime, Mark committed. Even if he suffered some flak, it’d be well worth escaping the house for a longer stretch.

  A few rounds later, the boys were pretty much neck and neck and out of quarters. Although Mark’s technique was more methodical, Hexx’s blitzkrieg strategy proved an equal match.

  “Good game.” Hexx extended his hand.

  “Yeah. Good game.” The two shook on it. “On me next time?”

  “Deal.”

  Mark spun on his heel, realizing too late they hadn’t exchanged names—but social finesse wasn’t his forte. Life had foiled him yet again.

  —

  Mark breathed a sigh of relief once he’d entered the back door.

  Hamburgers sizzled on the stovetop. A pot of water bubbled on another burner. Mom wielded a spatula while Tausha gathered cornhusks from the counter to throw away.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t late after all. He couldn’t believe his luck.

  “Set the table?” Mom asked her daughter.

  Next to the cutting board, on the center island, lay one of Tausha’s dolls. If the toy had a magazine of bullets across its chest and a machinegun in hand, it’d have been a female Rambo. The hair was shorn, the face and skin covered in war paint—probably marker. Her dress—animal skin with beading and fringe—was that of a tribal warrior. Upon closer inspection, Mark recognized the scrap of cloth from the garage. Nice work.

  “Mark, can you go down and tell your father dinner’s ready?”

  He cocked his head, narrowing his eyes. He’d half a mind to trade jobs with his sister, but knew that would potentially destroy the delicate balance of his mother’s universe.

  “You heard me right,” she said.

  Well, at least Mark wasn’t venturing into the basement alone this time.

  Dad fiddled with the wheel of the safe, which had become his before dinner ritual. Doubled over, he had his ear hovering close to the combination lock. “I think I’ve almost got it.”

  “Cool.” He watched his father deep in concentration, the excitement in the air of finding out what hid inside. A brief reek of chemicals passed through his nose. What was that? The smell triggered the memory of the time in biology class when the scalpel pierced the dissection pig, sending a squirt of fluid into his mouth. Mark cleared his throat and held his stomach.

  “Supper’s ready,” Mom called from the top of the stairs. Her tone broadcasted her disappointment in her son’s inefficiency.

  “Yeah, supper’s ready,” Mark said.

  “Shhh…” Dad’s tunnel vision for solving this puzzle was close to overriding his expected attendance at the dining room table. He kept spinning the dial, listening intently.

  “Come on, you know how she gets.”

  Mark wondered if this was the life of all scientists and inventors, like Einstein or Tesla. Certainly his father fit the mold, getting absorbed in seeing an important idea or task to its conclusion. Only then did such a man rest. Only then did the real world come into focus once again. Mark had been in that zone himself.

  Mark flickered the light switch, the effect jarring Dad’s fixation. “Tim
e. To. Eat.”

  “All right. All right.”

  They mounted the steps.

  Mark swore he heard the vault’s combination wheel rotating, but the tramping of their shoes on the stairs muddied his perception. It had to have been the clanking of the pipes or the water heater.

  Echoes made talented ventriloquists.

  January 1862

  In the basement, chemical fumes burned Emma’s nose. The overwhelming stench of decay rose up around her. The acidity made her queasy. While glancing at the iron door to the walk-in safe, she wondered if the rank atmosphere had seeped into there too. What was locked up in there, anyway? She resolved that the less she knew, the better.

  Her father didn’t take his eyes off the partially flayed corpse on the table.

  “Papa, the smell of death is infiltrating the entire house.”

  Buckets caked with rings of blood accompanied by the tubes with residue hid under the table. Jars of crimson liquid lined the shelves on the far wall.

  Prying the slit in the chest cavity, he grumbled, “Should’ve packed it in the snow by now, dammit.”

  “Certainly there’re laws against such practices.” She stepped back when noting the pile of skin lumped like strips of peeled paint at the edge of the table.

  “Legality doesn’t apply to savages, my dear.”

  Emma balled her fists, repressing a rant about how a human being was a human being because it was a waste of breath. “There’s the Durley reputation to consider, Papa. It’s one thing at the college. It’s another to have a body lying around in the open.”

  Her breath paused. What if the Dakota woman happened to look down from the window?

  Clearly, her father continued to disregard common decency, which fell more and more by the wayside. All pretense of proper behavior had almost completely eroded away.

  “What ever happened to the pharmacy?” she asked, hoping to revive the man she thought she’d known once. That considerate husband and father who served the community, where was he?

  “That was your mother’s dream. Now she’s gone.”

  “What about carrying on her memory?” Had Mama tempered his darkness? Or, would he have evolved in much this same way, even if she were still alive? Maybe remembering her mother would channel that essence into this house.

  “Care to lend me a hand? You’ll learn something. Could be quite valuable for your future treatments.” Papa’s hand swallowed the dripping heart, several arteries still attached. The red lump sloshed as it landed in the jar of chemicals. He reached under the table for another container sitting on the ledge.

  His choosing to forget Mama caused her shoulders to hunch.

  As Emma stomached the putrid rot of flesh, her shallow breaths offered no reprieve. Just because she possessed a talent for healing the sick and wounded, didn’t mean she hankered for an education from a poor soul who’d been hanged merely for warring for social justice. And her father went to revel in such a tragic spectacle. She had no interest in joining the throng of students and other supposed medical professionals who itched to discover if the red man’s insides were like all the others they’d cut open.

  “I think I’ve learned more than enough,” she said, exasperation leeching into her tone, but she couldn’t pull herself away just yet. Her feet anchored to the floor, her knees locked.

  The Indian’s neck wore bands of lacerations and Emma wondered if he’d at least been blessed with a clean break. Papa had delivered private lectures to her using past hanging victims as exhibits, information she mentally referred to now. Upon noticing the extent of blotching, this man’s eyes had bled out, and all the other capillaries had burst as well. Emma’s heart broke for the pain he’d endured while his brain either slowly asphyxiated, or his crushed trachea crippled his lungs.

  “Nonetheless, now that you’re here, you should observe the angel lust.”

  Her gaze traveled to the man’s genitals, which appeared swollen and purple. Encrusted trails of fluid surrounded the area, evidence of the postmortem priapism. Just observing the region made Emma’s insides smart like they’d taken a beating. Was the term angel lust meant to be a euphemism? The way in which the deceased welcomed the Angel of Death? How twisted.

  Standing by this cadaver validated how much she desired to distance herself from medicine, and from her father’s escalating unconventional practices. The focus of this house had definitely strayed from the principle of healing the sick.

  “I’m needed upstairs, Papa,” she finally said, referring to checking on the patients, which she’d completed over an hour ago.

  “Jon’s wife still laid up with pneumonia? You sure that’s what it is?”

  “I’ve ruled out the other possibilities.”

  “She’s not with child?”

  “Not likely, at least according to Jonathan.” Talk about complicating the status quo, and being Emma’s worst nightmare. “But she’s coming around.”

  “Good to hear. I look forward to making her acquaintance.”

  That makes two of us, Emma mused when appreciating how little she knew of the woman.

  Summer 1988

  The damn basement. Mark longed to pretend it didn’t exist, to wedge a chair against the doorknob and leave it there for good.

  While Mark and Tausha washed the dishes and Mom walked the dog, Dad picked up where he left off down there. He’d instructed them all not to wait up for him.

  Doing a double take, Mark took a closer look at the bottom of the stairs. In the border of his vision, there’d been another person’s shadow, but when his eyes focused, it disappeared. He inhaled deeply before closing the door and saying a prayer to himself on his father’s behalf. After he made the sign of the cross, he recalled the neighbor doing the same thing.

  Did such a gesture hold any water?

  Ha! Everything somehow went back to water these days.

  On that note, he headed to bed.

  —

  The vapor wafting from the stagnant pool smelled like the rancid rot from inside a carcass. Mark felt he breathed in fire. The gooey surface boiled and foamed as if a prehistoric substance. His heart stopped as something emerged. A goopy and gnarled dome became a sickly face. The eyelids still closed, the rest of the form rose, covered in green.

  A tattered dress clung to the feminine curves. The cloth slipped from the shoulders, drawing his attention to her skin. The soggy texture made him gag.

  A sour taste of bile filled his mouth. His skin contracted as he contemplated her spongy flesh. Her black eyes sprang open like a demonic doll’s. Her inhuman gaze stabbed his very core, and he knew he was facing a soul-less being. The eyes scorched like hot stove burners.

  A decomposing hand extended toward his throat.

  Mark woke, wet with perspiration. His pillowcase and sheets were damp, as if he’d taken a swim in the fountain. That idea made him unable to breathe. His heartbeat sped along at a rate close to heart attack status regarding the evil that lie in wait. He whipped his pillow from behind his head and squashed it to his chest. No one would grasp what he’d been feeling—or what he’d been seeing.

  His lip trembled.

  Something—a fiend, a spirit, the fountain—wanted to hurt him.

  Mark’s chest compressed.

  The devil on his shoulder advised him that his mother had to be right. All of the metal music, the cartoons, the swearing, had been an invitation for demons and darkness. Forget the fact that none of his friends had ever mentioned opening some gateway to hell. These dark forces had chosen him.

  He lied back, exhaustion sinking him deeper into the mattress. After pulling the blood warm sheets up to his chin, he shunned the moonlight streaming into the room. The crooked claws of the branches squealed against the half-open windowpane. Summer’s hot breath puffed into the house. Mark didn’t have to strain to hear its griping—the sighs of the woodwork and the building’s various joints.

  The door to the servants’ quarters was open again. However, that bother
ed him less and less. A perfume of fragrant flowers sent him back to sleep.

  —

  Mark opened his eyes early, despite himself. Snoozing half the day was one of the joys of summer. Not this morning.

  A scratching on Tausha’s door, then someone letting Salem out. The dog scrambled to the bottom of the staircase, probably Dad’s steps dawdling behind.

  The rest and the brutal sunlight made last night’s dream even worse.

  When Mark tugged at the sheet, there was an imprint next to him on the mattress. Despite the bed being queen-sized, he pretty much stayed on the side nearest the window for the sake of the incoming breeze. And once he was out, he was out. Tausha must’ve climbed in with him for a spell last night. He bet she’d deny it again, having discovered a new way to torture him.

  He lay there, emptying his mind for as long as he could.

  With a yawn and a stretch of his arms, Mark rose, then traipsed down the back stairwell and into the kitchen. He’d rather have been getting more use out of the elevator, but it was in Tausha’s room and he didn’t want to wake her. Plus, on the one instance his mother busted him stepping inside that box, she’d blasted him with, You have two working legs. Use them. You hear me?

  In the kitchen, Dad rubbed his eyes in front of the coffee maker. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.” Mark grabbed a bowl from the cupboard and fixed himself some Fruit Loops. “Am I the only one having nightmares in this place?”

  Salem crunched food from her dish.

  After pouring himself a cup of caffeine, Dad slurped. “Probably new house jitters is all.”

  Mark sat at the table, stirring his cereal. “Do we really have to live here?”

  “You know this is a big promotion for me and your mom. And, we’ll have more time for you and Tausha. Give it a chance.”

  Mark gobbled a spoonful of breakfast. “I meant this house. Do we really have live here?”

  “Pretty much. We’ve gotta find a way to make this work.”

  “Yeah, but we drove by lots of other for sale signs. I don’t get it.”