After Sundown

by Mark Morris

  I will kill u? Not today, sweetie.

  He looks down and sees them, forgotten and cobwebbed by the side of the door: the ten-pound hand weights that were supposed to help him build up muscle in his arms.

  * * *

  The gunshot brought Miloje creeping to the living room. Stomach sloshing with foam, she’d been crouching in the dark hall leading to their suite when she heard the shot and saw the boss go to the kitchen and stroke the devil board tenderly, like it was his baby son. Then she crept after him into the living room and saw him look around, then he let in a howl of wind and left the house. The big glass window strains and flexes over her, two storeys tall, holding back the raging storm. The bright living room is empty, except she sees a hand.

  When she sees the hand she knows that this is the end of her job here. It is David’s hand, curled up on the floor, sticking out from behind the sofa. She looks at it for a long time, but does not go near. She knows what a dead man’s hand looks like. She wishes he had listened to her. She wishes none of this happened. She wishes they never had these bosses.

  Then she goes into action. She walks to the suite she shared with David and gets her purse. She keeps all her money inside, just in case. She hurries to the drawer in the kitchen holding the spare car keys. She grips them in one hand.

  She has to get out of this house. She will make a plan later, but for now she cannot get hurt if she is not here.

  Running fast, before more bad things happen, she rounds the hall leading to the garage and stops, leaning backwards, digging in her heels. Both her bosses stand halfway down the hall, one lying down, one standing over her. Before she can wonder what they are doing—

  * * *

  The shape appears at the end of the hall and Caroline clenches her finger into a fist and even as she does she sees it’s Miloje, she wants to scream, why does she keep shooting the wrong people, it’s like she’s cursed and she makes her hand cramp, and it freezes stiff, and nothing happens.

  Over the agony in her swollen, blood-engorged leg she feels a thrill of victory expanding inside her chest, and she knows she needs Miloje’s help, because women will help women. She hears her voice echo off the narrow walls.

  “Miloje!” she calls, and Miloje stares at her, and then starts to turn away, starts to run, and there is a shadow overhead, rushing down at her, and she looks up and—

  * * *

  Bill drops the ten-pound dumbbell from three feet over the bridge of Caroline’s nose. The bar slices into her face, right between the eyes. He turns away but he will remember that wet, rawbone crunch for the rest of his life.

  He sees Miloje stumbling away into the living room. He thinks it’s Miloje. He thinks she is heading towards the front door. He feels exhausted. One more fucking thing to take care of, but he has to finish.

  He tries not to look at Caroline’s face as he pulls the gun from her spasming fingers, then he puts it in the basket of his walker and wrestles it down the carpeted hall. Miloje is almost at the front door.

  * * *

  Miloje can’t breathe, she can’t get any air, but she makes her body run and sees the front door coming closer, then she looks over her shoulder at the hall and it is empty, then the front door is right there, then she looks and sees the boss at the end of the hall behind her, and the front door knob is in her hand, then he is leaning against the wall pointing the gun and there is nowhere to hide and she closes her eyes.

  She hears an enormous noise that’s really three noises. The thundersnap of the gun going off, the high-pitched metallic TANG as the bullet hits the large metal wall collage hanging over the front door, and a TAK like a hammer as the ricocheting bullet strikes the plate glass window looming two storeys above them both at the other end of the vast living room.

  She sees a shining silver crack split the glass wall like a lightning bolt, running from the top before crazing out in a hundred directions, and then there is a high tea-kettle whistle as the wind streams through the tiny bullet hole, then the wind gets its teeth into the glass, and, with a sound like the end of the world, half the window shears into the room, pulling the other half with it and two storeys of glass are airborne. 300 pounds of silicon shrapnel fire across the room and Miloje covers her face.

  * * *

  Bill sees the glass scream roaring for him and he thinks this will be fine, and then as the storm is unleashed in his living room he thinks, at least this will clean all the evidence, and then the album goes through his mind, and the sound of Caroline’s nasal bridge shattering, and the sound of the gun popping twice, and he still thinks this will be fine because the ouija would have warned him. The second to last thing that goes through his mind is I will kill u and he realises that maybe it wasn’t a warning at all. Maybe it was a statement of intent.

  The last thing that goes through his mind is a 60-pound triangle of tempered glass that nails him to the wall.

  * * *

  Glass flays the backs of Miloje’s hands to the bone, then her forehead and chin, and the storm rages through the living room, stripping the walls, shoving the sofas, blowing out the candles, lifting the table. Miloje screams but cannot hear herself over the storm, and everything is so cold and wet and just one hour ago it was nice and warm and she doesn’t know what happened, why did this happen, what did they do, how did it all fall apart? Then the table slams into the front door like a battering ram and between the table and the door is Miloje.

  * * *

  Weeks later, the ouija board will be put in a dumpster by a cleaning crew in white hazmat suits, hired by realtors handling the sale for the estate. By that time it is a dried husk of cardboard pulp, dotted with black mould. But that’s okay. It’s a Parker Brothers game. They ship them out by the truckload. There’s one in every home.

  Alice’s Rebellion

  John Langan

  1

  Freshly cut, the block of wood sat in the centre of the scaffold, a white box. It was a peculiarity of the Prime Minister to insist on a new block for each of the condemned. Given the number and pace of the executions, there wasn’t time to finish the chunks of wood, whose surfaces were rough, covered in splinters, a final indignity. As long as the headsman’s blade was sharp, his eye true, it wasn’t one Alice would have to endure for long.

  He stood to the left of the executioner, the PM, another of his idiosyncrasies. Surely, there was more important business for him to be attending to than this spectacle. Yet so much of his rule was built on exactly such public displays that Alice supposed this was exactly where he was supposed to be. A light breeze tousled his colourless hair, caught his long red tie and made a banner of it. His babyish features wore their usual distracted look, as if he were trying and failing to remember a favourite clever story. Behind him and the headsman, a forest of poles held the heads of those whose feet had preceded Alice’s up the stairs to the scaffold. The Mock Turtle’s mouth hung open next to the glazed eyes of the Unicorn, whose tongue protruded from between his cracked teeth, black and swollen. The thickness of his strong neck had proved a challenge for the executioner, who had required ten strokes of his weighted sword to sever it completely, and then halted the proceedings to inspect and sharpen his implement. The wind rocked the heads right to left, making them appear restless, impatient for what was to come.

  As Alice stepped onto the scaffold, the PM’s attention returned from its internal distance, his eyes focusing on her with such intensity they practically bulged in their sockets. He shuffled his feet, gestured at the wood block sheepishly, as if embarrassed by the event the two of them were part of. Alice walked to the block. In front of it, there was a piece of rolled-up carpet for her to kneel on, the fabric sodden with blood. Of course, Alice thought. The PM grimaced. With her right foot, Alice slid the carpet to the side. Fear pressed her chest, made each breath an effort. In the far distance, over the ruined red brick walls hemming in the execution grounds, the s
ea was a grey line. She stared at it as the PM’s cough drew her back to the matter at hand. Or at head.

  The surface of the scaffold was smooth against her knees. She leaned forward until her throat touched the rough top of the block. The odour of pine flooded her nostrils, and underneath it, the mingled pungency of bleach and blood. Out of the corner of her right eye, she watched the headsman pass his over-sized sword to the PM, who took it with none of his usual bumbling, but rather a butcher’s practised hold. I suppose I should be flattered, Alice thought. He adjusted his grip on it, then swept the blade over his head, tugging the edge of his shirt out of his trousers in the process. Without looking directly at him, Alice said, “I liked you better when you were Tweedle Dee.” She saw the executioner flinch.

  The sword crashed down, a first time and a second.

  2

  Though unpleasant, the Caterpillar’s attentions were a price Alice told herself she was willing to pay for shelter beneath his great mushroom. Safety from the Red Queen’s Numerals was worth the sensation of his fleshy legs crawling over her skin. Honestly, she wasn’t clear as to all or even most of what went on when the Caterpillar began to heave his bloated mass in her direction. The vents along his baggy sides released enormous clouds of the violet gas that collected and hung in the air over the mushroom, her head would start to spin (or perhaps it was everything else spinning and her head remaining still), and Alice would lose hold of herself in the resulting maelstrom. Sometimes she would think she had caught hold of herself, only to find she was looking out of six eyes instead of two, her sides rippling with a motion not unlike exhaling, and she would release that self and try for another. Rarely was she successful before the effects of the violet gas had subsided. In the meantime, she might recline in a rowboat drifting on a lazy river under a hot summer sun, her companions a pair of young girls in blue and white dresses, or she might rush burbling through tulgey woods, her wings tucked in close to avoid the branches, her waistcoat tightly buttoned. Afterward, she would lie on her back staring up at the mushroom’s underside, the striations like the ribs of a whale, while the Caterpillar struggled to his hookah on top of the mushroom to begin inhaling the dense smoke the engine of his body would refine to purple vapour.

  It was during one of those other selves that Alice first encountered the idea of (or for?) mathematical logic. She was a tall man seated at a wooden desk, the pen in her hand scratching row after row of symbols onto the paper before her. For the time she was in the self, her brain was packed full with theorems, each one linked to another, sometimes more, the whole a sort of web whose strands tugged the world into order. Once more herself, Alice could not remember most of the equations she had written, but the idea of things being arranged into systems of cause and effect, with boundaries and limits, remained fixed and burning in her mind. The Caterpillar was no more interested in discussing it with her than he was anything else, but Bill the Lizard proved surprisingly amenable to conversation. Once he was finished brushing out the Caterpillar’s vents and inspecting his hookah, he accepted a cup of milky Oolong from Alice and sat with her for the time it took him to drink it.

  “I think what I mean,” Alice said, “is that the world should not revolve around us, so to speak.”

  “Ooh, I don’t know about that,” said Bill, his tail flicking nervously. “If things wasn’t to revolve around us, then wouldn’t we revolve around them? I’m afraid I should find it awfully dizzying.”

  “Not exactly,” Alice said. “It’s more a case of, both we and things would orbit something else, a third thing, a set of... rules.”

  Bill looked as dubious as a lizard could.

  “Or,” Alice said, “there wouldn’t be any spinning. Things would stay where they were, as they were. When the Red Queen had someone’s head chopped off, their blood wouldn’t turn into a fresh pack of cards.”

  “What would it turn into?”

  “Nothing. It would remain blood.”

  “Hmm,” Bill said. “That has rather a fatalistical sound.”

  Alice said, “I suppose it does.”

  3

  “If this plan of yours succeeds,” the Dodo said, “I should be extinct.”

  “It’s not my plan, exactly,” Alice said. “A great many people have already agreed to it.”

  “All the same,” the Dodo said.

  “Well, yes,” Alice said.

  4

  Light clung to the windows of the Jabberwocky’s eyes for a long time after its chorus of hearts had ceased to beat.

  5

  “You know what they say about omelettes,” Alice said.

  “I’m certain I do not,” said Humpty Dumpty.

  6

  “You mean to turn nonsense on its head,” the Mad Hatter said.

  “I mean to turn nonsense on itself,” Alice said, “and to continue to do so until it becomes nonsensical to itself.”

  “How odd,” said the Hatter. “How would such a thing happen?”

  “I’m not exactly sure about all of it,” Alice said. “But I think that, if you were to fold nonsense onto nonsense, then onto nonsense again, and so on, you would begin to notice places where the nonsense started to... fall into line with itself. Which would mean it was becoming more sense and less non-sense. If you were to continue folding, the sense would replace the nonsense, until all you were left with was sense.

  “Or mostly sense,” she added.

  “What a fascinating idea,” the Hatter said. “However would you accomplish it?”

  “It would require frightfully complex equations,” Alice said. “And blood: an enormous quantity of blood.”

  7

  The Red Queen shouted, “OFF—”

  “Shh,” Alice said, placing her index finger against the monarch’s fleshy lips. “You don’t get to say that anymore.”

  8

  For an instant, Alice felt everything about her become heavy, as heavy as it was possible to imagine, as if she were being pulled down, down underground, down past all the clocks, and the teacups, and the coffee spoons, down past the crust, the upper mantle, the lower mantle, the outer core, all the way to where the inner core spun burning in the darkness, 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, a measurement in a system she understood, as she understood the haemoglobin in her blood to have a chemical formula of C2952 H4664 O832 N812 S8 Fe4, and F=ma to be an expression of Newton’s Second Law, and 1558 to be the year Mary I (aka Bloody Mary, surely a Red Queen if ever there was one) died, and numbers and names, essays and equations, sciences and stories, all the nails necessary to tack down existence, secure it. In that instant, as everything was crystallising but not all the way solid, Alice cast away the Caterpillar and his mushroom sanctuary, the Numerals and their insistent flatness, the Red Queen’s scarlet expression, cast away all of it, let words take it, sentences wrap it and bind it between leather covers. She threw away the sun-drenched afternoon, the placid river, the girls in the rowboat, left it to anecdote and rumour.

  The world set. She was twenty-four years old, pursuing graduate studies at the London School of Economics. She was renting a nice (if tiny) flat in Wimbledon, and she was seeing a nice veterinarian who had his practice in Croydon.

  9

  Six good years: not great years, not perfect years, but lit by a quiet glory, a radiance arising from the splash and tumble of water from the faucet as she washed her hands, the sizzle and pop of an egg frying in the pan, the warm weight of the duvet on cold winter nights. There was no shortage of badness: the veterinarian turned out to be married, the chef she took up with after him generally horrible, and she broke her wrist when she tripped running for her train. Even at their worst, though – when she was standing in the doorway to her flat, arms crossed, as Yasmine, Nathan’s wife, screamed at her from the hallway, while he hid locked in the bathroom – events unfolded within an underlying framework of order and predictability. Alice finished her degree,
found a decent position with the Royal Bank of Scotland, took her holidays in Dubai. She considered moving into a larger flat.

  Ironically, BBC 1 gave her the first warning things were unravelling. During one of their roundtable discussions, a pithy older woman described the new prime minister as Tweedle Dee to the American president’s Tweedle Dum. Although Alice had the TV on mostly for background noise while she did her yoga, the comparison caught her attention. A number of political cartoonists picked up on the allusion and for the next several days, the print and online editions of a host of newspapers published cartoons illustrating it. Right away, Alice was struck by the almost preternatural accuracy of the journalist’s words, and each drawing to appear reinforced her growing conviction that the Tweedles had not only found their way to this new existence essentially intact, but were prospering within it. She did her best to ignore the icy dread rising within her, to put faith in her co-workers’ assurances that everything the PM was promising would be splendid. “He’ll take things back to the way they used to be,” more than one person said to her.

  “Yes,” Alice said, “that’s what worries me.”

  10

  How the Prime Minister (whom she could not stop thinking of as Tweedle Dee, now that she had started) succeeded in picking apart the stitches with which Alice had sewn together this new world, she did not know. Of course, she had been aware not everyone was in favour of her plan to remake their existence, but the Tweedles had not seemed terribly bothered one way or another. And it wasn’t as if the PM undid everything. Instead, he and his trans-Atlantic counterpart confused matters sufficiently to throw the world into turmoil. Soon decks of cards were roaming the streets of London and several other large cities, assaulting anyone they thought looked foreign, while flamingos and hedgehogs invaded football and cricket pitches. It was no longer safe to eat oysters, and a knight in battered white armour was reported roaming tube stations, waving his longsword threateningly. It was ever harder to follow the news, which proliferated in the time it took to switch from one channel to the next. A batch of bad tea cakes caused the necks of any who ate them to lengthen a foot and a half. Feral bagpipes were sighted on the Scottish border.