Ashes and Entropy

by Laird Barron

  “Beats a cell, huh?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Anyway, I was just calling to remind you of our appointment this morning. Wouldn’t want you to be late.”

  “Appointment?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten, Owen.”

  “What time was it at again?”

  “Ten, Owen. The appointment’s at ten. You will be here, correct?”

  “Is there any way we can re—”

  “No, Owen. That’s now how this works.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there at ten.”

  “Good. That’s what I like to hear. See ya then, Owen.”

  I tell the boy who is not my son that I’m going to be gone for a couple hours, that they should just stay in my apartment and try to relax. I wish I had a TV for them to use. Instead I show them my collection of paperbacks I’ve been slowly scavenging from Goodwill. I don’t know if any of them can read, but if they can they’re in for one hell of a treat.

  Before I leave, the boy who is not my son tells me they’re hungry again.

  “I know. I’ll try to bring some food home on the way back, okay? You like Ramen?”

  And the boy just stares, face blank. “Hungry.”

  Hungry, hungry. They’re always so goddamn hungry.

  I can’t feed them all.

  ~

  The parole officer doesn’t have much to say. It’s the same conversation every time. How are you adjusting? Fine. How is your new job? Okay. Have you been in contact with family? Some. Where do you see yourself in five years? I don’t know. Have you attended your required Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for the month? Not yet, but I will before the month ends. Have you had any alcohol since your release? No. Have you desired any? Yes. How often? Every second I’m awake. What stops you? The fear. The fear of what? Of hurting someone else. Of going back to jail. Of fucking up my second chance. Do you still think you deserve a second chance? No. Why not? I don’t know. You don’t know? No. Will you pee in this cup? Yeah, I’ll pee in that cup.

  ~

  On the way home, I stop at Goodwill and purchase a large assortment of children’s clothing. There’s not much money in my checking account and I’m holding my breath as I insert my debit card into the chip reader. Miraculously it goes through. I try my luck again at the Dollar General next door and buy a basket-full of Ramen noodles. Again, it goes through. What the hell. Things are actually on my side this morning. Even my parole officer was mostly pleasant. These kids, it’s like they’re some sort of good luck charm. I ought to keep them around, see what happens. I already fucked up one child’s life. Maybe this “second chance”—as my P.O. calls it—is a lot more significant than I realized. Maybe I was released from Centralia to help these kids, to save them. Feed them. Shelter them. Take care of them. Be the dad none of them ever had.

  I walk into my apartment with a smile on my face, and I’m only two steps inside before the smile vanishes forever.

  Kenneth and Mallory Noble.

  Sitting on my couch.

  Fuck, not now. Oh shit oh shit. NOT NOW!

  The kids sitting on the floor around the couch all turn to me, faces stained red, as if asking, What? What’s wrong?

  I rush forward, stumbling for the right excuse. “Look, it’s not what it looks like, okay?”

  Still in denial about what I’m looking at, about what’s happened while I was gone.

  “You have to leave,” I whisper, although I don’t know who I’m saying this to. Kenneth and Mallory. The kids. Myself. Someone, anyone. We all have to leave. Leave and never come back again. This is a bad place. The kids have made it so.

  I refuse to acknowledge reality until I’m up close, practically on top of them. Although Kenneth and Mallory are sitting and staring in my direction, they do not see me. Where eyeballs once rested, their sockets now remain black and empty, as if scraped clean and sucked dry. Their clothing is ripped to shreds and hundreds of tiny bite marks trail up and down their bodies. Their mouths hang open in a perpetual scream. Neither still possesses a tongue.

  I back away, trembling. The kids don’t move. The red on their faces. Of course I know what it is. And they know I know. They want me to know. The boy who is not my son stands from the floor and slowly approaches me, one hand out, fingers stained vermillion.

  “Friend?”

  ~

  The next morning the bodies are gone. I don’t know what the kids did with them and I don’t want to know.

  Nobody complains about being hungry.

  Later, the boy who is not my son tells me about the Bad Man.

  The Bad Man wants to hurt the kids. Wants to kill them. Has already killed some, will surely kill more. The Bad Man is evil. The kids try to hide but the Bad Man always finds them, no matter where they go, how far they run. The Bad Man travels in people’s shadows. He’s not human. He’s everywhere and nowhere at once.

  The boy who is not my son tells me about the Bad Man, then he tells me where the Bad Man lives.

  “Help,” he says. “Help. Help. Help.”

  ~

  The Bad Man lives in a motel across the city. Come dusk, the boy leads the way, the other kids hanging back at my apartment. We take the train. No one seems to notice either of us. The boy already knows what room he’s staying in. I ask the night clerk at the motel for an extra key, claiming to have lost mine at a bar. The clerk, annoyed I distracted him from whatever he’s watching on his laptop, barely glances at me as he programs a new keycard and tosses it on the front desk.

  “Have a good night,” he mumbles, sitting back down.

  No one’s in the motel room when we slip inside, which is probably for the best. Gives me time to look around, get a feel for who this Bad Man really is. The room’s a disaster. Empty fast food bags littered across the floor. Discarded clothes here and there. Thick tomes with strange symbols on the covers. On the desk in the corner of the room, I find a large crossbow. It’s loaded with an arrow, ready to go. Why does he have this? Why does he have any of this?

  On the wall, above the motel desk, a corkboard hangs with dozens of photographs and drawings tacked within its borders. Printouts of maps laying out the streets of Chicago. Newspaper articles with headlines emphasizing grisly murders and strange disappearances. Photographs of random children. Photographs of murder scenes. Many, many pencil drawings of kids. Kids with black eyes and long fangs. Kids without faces. Kids with—

  A noise outside the room. Footsteps. Heavy breathing.

  I freeze. The boy who is not my son hides behind the bed. Someone inserts a keycard into the door lock. A click of acceptance. The handle turns. The door opens. A tall obese man in a fedora and trench coat stands in the opening. The brown paper bag falls from his grasp at the sight of me.

  “What are you doing in my—” He pauses. “Did they send you?”

  I don’t respond.

  “They did, didn’t they? They sent you. They were too scared to do it themselves, weren’t they? So they found someone else to do their dirty work.” He laughs. His throat sounds clogged with phlegm.

  “Who are you?” The words barely leave my lips.

  “Who did they say I was?”

  “The Bad Man.”

  Again, the laugh. “Well, they aren’t wrong.”

  “You have to leave them alone. You have to go far away.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Not after all the work I’ve done. Fuck that.” He gestures to the corkboard, then stops. Sniffs. “One of them is here now, aren’t they? I can smell the fucker. Where is it?”

  As if on cue, the boy who is not my son stands from behind the bed, but this time when I look at him he is no longer the boy who is not my son but is instead my son, my Bobby, my poor dead beautiful baby boy, and he is so perfect tears burst from my eyes at the sight of him.

  The Bad Man grins. “Yeah, there you are, you motherfucker. I’ll never forget that smell.”

  He reaches inside his trench coat, and I realize he’s going for a weapon.
<
br />   A weapon to injure my boy.

  No.

  I pick up the crossbow and aim it at the Bad Man and pull the trigger and an arrow shoots out and penetrates his gut. His hand falls from his trench coat, a pistol hitting the floor. The man groans and steps back, eyes wide and focused on me standing across the room, still holding the crossbow. I drop the killing device on the desk and move toward him. Fear and panic glow like electricity across his face. Both of his hands caress the arrow in his stomach but he doesn’t pull it out, he doesn’t dare.

  I follow him out to the second-story landing, him still backpedaling until he bumps against the stair railing.

  “You don’t understand,” he whispers, wincing and groaning. “You don’t understand what they are.”

  But he’s wrong. I understand exactly what they are.

  “They’re mine,” I tell him, and push his chest with both hands. He stumbles back, reaching for air, and crashes down the stairs, rolling and flipping and screaming.

  By the time he reaches the bottom, he’s silent again.

  On the way back home, Bobby tells me he’s hungry again, and I rub his hair and tell him he can have whatever he wants, anything at all, and he smiles and holds my hand and says, “Daddy?” and I smile back and nod and say yes, yes, yes.

  YELLOW HOUSE

  by Jon Padgett

  You’ll find it on Old Shell Road between the docks and the park. It is asymmetrical and L shaped and includes several octagonal rooms and a kind of attic-tower with curved windows. It is excessively ornamental with fish-scale siding. It is three stories tall.

  I live in the yellow house with my grandmother. Each morning she hobbles downstairs from her room in the side attic-tower. My grandmother is bent over so that her torso is nearly parallel to the floor, head straining forward, a crooked smile playing on her face. Her rheumy eyes appear addled.

  “Where did my Millie run off to?” she might ask on one of her more lucid days. Millie is her daughter and my mother.

  Grandmother calls me her heart before turning around and trudging back upstairs. My grandfather, a small but fat man who resembles a walking roly-poly, may or may not accompany her. He doesn’t recall that he died many years ago. I remind him sometimes, at which points he sits down in an old easy chair in the living room and stares at the hutch where his television used to be.

  The woodwork is gaudy in the front sitting room of the yellow house. Its bay window overlooks the park. Stare through that window at your own risk. If it’s raining outside, you may get stuck inside the glass. It’s thicker than it looks. The glass is old and warped. Through it, a huge, storm-ravaged magnolia appears to be a water spout hovering over brown, undulating leaf-water.

  I’m forgetting something.

  Maybe this: grandmother hates my mother for getting pregnant with me out of wedlock. That makes me a kind of bastard, grandmother says sometimes.

  I don’t know where my mother is, but I think about her every day.

  No, that’s not what I’m forgetting.

  The yellow house backs up to Dunnstown Bay. There are waves during storm season, sometimes as high as ten to twenty feet, crashing on the dingy shoreline. The bay is unclean. There is a decaying boardwalk that runs along the shoreline. During storm season the filmy, rainbow-sheened water often threatens to flood the bottom floor of the yellow house.

  In the distance, through a sliding glass door in the kitchen, you can see a line of gargantuan, steel, electrical pylons marching diagonally across the bay. The closest one appears impossibly tall. I sometimes pretend it’s a giant, skeletal doll in the form of my grandmother as she once was—erect, hands flung up in an attitude of eternal, shocked rage. The next pylon is further out and appears from my vantage point like a much smaller skeletal doll. Sometimes I like to imagine it is me as a child, impersonating grandmother’s attitude, connected to her by multiple metal wires.

  “I wonder where mother went,” pylon-doll-me says.

  “God knows where that whore has run off to this time,” the pylon-doll-grandmother in my head might reply. “Rutting like a cur in heat with only hell knows what.”

  “Don’t profane my mother,” I imagine the smaller pylon figure responds. By this point I find my eyes drawn further across the bay, beyond the smaller of the two pylons, into the distance where a third pylon stands. This one, I imagine, is my skeletal-doll-mother running away. From my vantage point, the lines between pylon-her and pylon-me are invisible. It appears there is nothing at all connecting her to us. I smile, imagining my mother in mid-escape, almost out of reach, nearly free of the yellow house. It feels like part of me is on the verge of being set free as well.

  I imagine grandmother dislikes these smiling thoughts. I can feel the giant pylon-doll form glaring down at me through the sliding glass doors and, simultaneously, through the floor of her tower-attic behind and above me. Grandmother reminds me that the pylon-doll is in fact still connected to us, no further off than she ever was. Waiting to be reeled in. Not that I can hear grandmother saying these words exactly, but I can sense them through every board, each yard of old plaster and petrified wood in this yellow house.

  I also sense she wants me to close my eyes again, but I’ve learned to never do that.

  See, whenever I close my eyes for any length of time, the yellow house changes. When that happens, it is no longer a glorious three-story but a lowly single-story. I could be anywhere in the yellow house—in the guest bedroom or kitchen or foyer. But as soon as I close my eyes for more than several seconds, I am sitting in a low ceilinged, ranch-style living room. I have spent so much time in this phantom house, and I can never remember how to open my eyes when I’m there. I stumble around, feeling the walls, the floors, the cheap but locked hollow doors for some escape route until, days or weeks later it seems, all at once I’m back in the fully restored, three-story yellow house again, eyes open.

  If only I could remember what I’ve forgotten.

  Maybe it is this: there is an intercom system that grandmother had installed many years ago throughout the yellow house so that she could monitor every word that was spoken within it. Each room still contains a plastic, louvred square on the wall. On each square is a brown switch that may be pressed to contact and speak with other individuals in the house.

  Many years ago, I spent the night with my grandparents while my mother went out. They were arguing about her, and while they screamed at each other over who was to blame for my mother’s rebellious and self-destructive nature, I dismantled the intercom system’s central control panel on the living room wall. When I was caught in the act soon afterwards, I told grandmother I had only been curious. She replied that the devil in me was to blame.

  “Go fetch a switch,” she said. Of course, I brought in the flimsiest twig I could find. Grandmother grabbed me, marched me outside and made me strip a long, sharp piece of wood from a boardwalk piling. Then she struck my bare, right leg with it over and over until my skin was a mass of splintered gore.

  There were other severe punishments over the years, always aimed at that one, poor leg. She never explained why it was the target of her reprimands. I wonder if she thought that’s where the devil in me lived. Following these beatings, grandmother called me her heart and pulled me close, squeezing me too hard as I bawled.

  “You got book learning but no horse sense,” my grandfather would observe, not unkindly, when grandmother walked me back through the sliding glass door of the yellow house.

  As years went on, I developed a permanent limp from grandmother’s attempted exorcisms, but I guess the devil never left me. And her intercom system never worked again.

  There is still something I’m forgetting—not the intercom system nor the switchings.

  Perhaps it’s only this: these days, in spring and summer, I sit in the kitchen overlooking the ruined boardwalk and pray for storms. I start by imagining I can make the bay-wind change direction. Just gradually at first. After pretending that I’m moving the branches o
f a tall, skinny pine out back, I set my sights on the clouds above the murky bay. I begin concentrating on pulling them towards the yellow house. Then, if I get that far without interruption, I imagine those clouds darkening and building. All the while the wind seems to pick up. And sometimes it storms.

  My mind, at these moments, is focused on one goal: to see this yellow house demolished. I want to see it in ruins, even if it means an end to me and grandmother and the befuddled ghost of my grandfather. Don’t misunderstand. I love my grandparents, regardless of how they may or may not feel about my mother. But my loathing of this place outstrips all affections. I want the yellow house razed.

  And one summer, late in the storm season, I came so close to success.

  I had mastered the winds, slowly, quietly, sweet talking the puffy white clouds into massive thunderheads—far off over the bay so that there was only yet a whisper of the storm that was to come. Grandmother was quiescent, the floorboards creaking in time with her napping snores. As the minutes of my concentration ticked by, I coaxed five little fingers of dark purple cloud into the now churning bay.

  To my delight and astonishment, the funnel clouds soon became full-fledged waterspouts, dwarfing even the closest electrical pylons in size. They swirled and howled in the water, the catastrophic winds producing waves big enough to crash upon the boardwalk itself, smashing many of its rotten boards to pieces, even hurling a switch-sized sliver of piling through the kitchen window.

  The crash woke grandmother, who immediately rushed into the kitchen and seized me. No old man or woman, bent over and ancient, should ever move that swiftly.

  “What have you done to us, wicked heart?” she asked, shrieking into my ear. The wind shook the yellow house to its foundations.

  “Nothing at all, grandmother,” I replied, quivering with fear and victory.

  She twisted my wounded, right leg with a gnarled hand, making me squawk.

  “You have so much to feel guilty about, my little bastard-child. Now close your eyes and make it all better.”