Dead Echo

by C.G. Banks

  *

  All over Leszno’s Acres the scene was much the same. People locked away in their houses among the growing omnipotence of some foul deed. Grass continued to grow more ragged and high in ill-tended yards, cars to sink a little lower on deflating tires. The few windows that had been opened to the light now closed by the pull of trembling fingers crouched low against walls in the fear someone, or something, would find them and come looking.

  Oscar Levant sat quietly at the card table that now served for dining, a Banquet TV dinner before him. It was only slightly heated and tasteless but still he ate on, his eyes on a fixed point somewhere out far ahead of him, never on the crumpled form of his oldest daughter (the only one who had still lived with him) sprawled in the hallway, one claw hand curled like stone on the tile entranceway to the kitchen. The baseball bat he’d used to cave in her head lay on the table by a roll of napkins. Blood and hair still stuck to its side.

  The lake, especially now after dark, had developed slow rolls that washed up on the bank like a tide returning. It took no wind for these motions to continue all the night long. And along its weedy banks, if one had the inclination to look, could be found clothing: shirts, torn shorts, the sodden shoe of a late mailman. Rounded shapes appeared and disappeared like waterlogged corks bobbing to the surface and occasionally, if the night was clear and the moon in the right spot, sharp glints of light would reflect from these eyes of the dead. Forms milled out from the treeline, some two legged and upright howling like dogs at the moon.

  Things moved beneath the ground.

  And no one escaped and no one called out for help. Not here in the Eye.

  Norma Deplessis, seventy-one years old, and for the world ten or fifteen years younger-looking than was her right, had broken every mirror in her home, of which there had been a great many. She’d lived with her husband in California until the late seventies when he’d run off with another woman, but by that time she’d had most of the procedures done to well-known Hollywood stars and their ilk. He had produced “dirty movies” and even though it was not a thing Norma could suffer quietly, the money had been plentiful enough to point her head the other direction.

  But of course the sin had found her out, both then and now.

  Among the new chin and forehead, the high cheek bones and sculpted nose, the raised and full breasts, tummy tucks and ear pinnings, he’d found another toy and thrown the old one away. And she’d realized her sin like an ages-old coma victim suddenly struggling to the surface of consciousness. She’d looked around, appalled, at the earthly opulence in which she was surrounded, alone now since he’d left week before, and she’d thrown it all off. Moved back to Louisiana. Bought the little house in Leszno’s Acres and tried to forget the life she’d once lived.

  But how she had loved her beauty. Everyone had a right to at least one vice and hers was vanity. Not that she could harm the world in any way; not now, at this age, but old habits were hard to break.

  Or had been.

  Now her home was a glittering jumble of broken glass. When the Undoing had begun she’d taken to breaking the smaller mirrors, but after awhile it became impossible, imperative, not to smash every last one. One hundred and seven. She knew because she’d counted, many times. Designed to catch her every move from every angle, which of course made things all the more horrible in the early stages.

  Because the surgeries had begun to…undo. At first just little things, things no ordinary person, one not trained to the least disturbance in their physical form, would notice. But she had been and did. Stepping out of the shower, one breast a tad lower than the other, its nipple discolored and swollen. And later the eruptions on her nose, the bleeding when she’d done her bathroom duties.

  She’d taken to breaking the mirrors shortly thereafter.

  Now, a little over a month later, the mirrors were mere fragments of nasty jags lining the floor and cabinets. The powder from the violence done them reflected everywhere in the house like little diamonds of glitter in every tuck and fold. Tiny, lighter than air bits and shards of glass railed on the currents when the air conditioner switched on. She could feel these edges scratching her lungs when she breathed.

  But Norma didn’t care. She was Undone completely now, so nothing else mattered. Her ears hung like a hounds, her nose a malformed cucumber, her dugs now flappy, deflated sacks hanging below her waist. Great rents criss-crossed her face and her hair had fallen out in chunks, her stomach rebelling against anything she put into her mouth now so terribly bereft of teeth.

  So she sat tightly rolled up in a stinking blanket from her bedroom in the last vain attempt to hide the reality of the Undoing. Sat and listened far into the night at the ululations of howls that seemed to start somewhere out there near the lake but were joined by more vicious things as the night descended in its primitive depravity.

  Because humans were not the only ones subject to such mysteries. All around and within the faint demarcations of the poisoned acres, animals in their simple understanding were learning the savage imperatives of the time. A group of former house cats, now feral, stalked the nights with bloody intent. Lone dogs were victims of their savagery, their squeals and howls breaking the unnatural stillness. Rabies had spread from squirrels to mice to rats to raccoons. Everywhere was the steady beat of upheaval.

  A thirty-seven year old African parrot, bought years before by a former zoo curator, had consumed its own legs a day before and now bleed slowly out on the floor of its putrid cage, its owner unmindfully in the grip of horrible manifestations and confined to her bedroom.

  In numerous attics across the length and breadth of the neighborhood battles were being waged between species, their clamor bone-chilling and unforgettable to those who heard them.

  The band of squirrels that’d set upon the Colonel had settled into the top of a large elm and stripped every leaf from it in some mindless fury.

  Birds plummeted from the sky to lay twitching and dead within the perimeter of the acres.

  Earthworms emerged from the ground in gouts as if on the run from some ominous presence seeking them in the cool, fecund levels.

  Owls deserted, Opossums gained unearthly sight.

  And in the backyard of the house where Carolyn Skate had sought sanctuary her grave yawned open and ready. Todd Buchanan stood shirtless and dirty under the red moon, his skin aflame from the sacks of lye he’d steadily lined the hole with for the past three hours. Milly, his wife of five years, even now finished the heavy stitching to hold the body within the confines of the Persian rug that had been the only splurge in their entire life together. Tonight it did not matter. What blood had managed to escape the thick, rolled mat would have to be expunged, the hole filled and reset with the pallet of turf Todd had purchased almost a month before and watered religiously every night as he slowly drank himself to madness.

  Because standing here now, under the influence of the bloody moon, madness had come to roost. The neighborhood had gone to plague and there would be no rescue. Things had passed beyond that mark. The price of blood had been paid.

  Todd stumbled into the tomb-darkness of the house to help pull the body to the pit.