When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  When?

  On the night o’ the high feast, darlin’.

  And again, she read thoughts beyond his silence.

  The face o’ this earth was created t’ hold those who canna’ see more. Tonight y’ve gone beyond anythin’ most people know. But there’s another beyond and ’tis final f’r this journey. When the time comes, I’ll be takin’ y’ there.

  And in that place of thought beyond the Irishman’s silence, she joined him and saw what he saw, felt what he felt about it, and was glad for the vast emptiness of herself. Because the vision flowed and filled even her space and his, and more.

  When the Weaver wove that night, he wove away only the knowledge of the Irishman’s presence.

  The woman slept until dawn in the curve of Mean Joe’s shoulder. He held her as if she were a burn victim in whose tormented brain even thought dared not alight.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  A succession of days went by. Eventually the woman saw that Catherine had washed her hair and fluffed it in a loose style. She was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt grimy with packing dust. Catherine was silent and quite unlike herself; she did not issue scathing statements full of projected changes for the future. In fact, no Troop member said anything. The silence went on, as if a wake were being held.

  The big black letters on the kitchen calendar stared back: September. Next to the kitchen calendar hung a long list, apparently designating the contents of the packing boxes scattered across the floor. The woman was not aware of climbing the stairs to the loft bedroom each night. Sometimes she would awaken, feeling the carving knife in her hand and the stepfather’s vital organs, bloodied on the bed beside her. She knew each time, as sadness welled up, that the organs weren’t real. The knife was and it frightened Rabbit who tried to hide under the bedclothes.

  * * *

  When she surfaced at all, it was briefly, sluggishly. Almost the only sensation she experienced was the thousands of needles stinging her arms and legs. The move was made without her presence. One day she became aware that her surroundings were different. Her surroundings were nothing more than four weather-beaten walls, a floor dirty with pigeon droppings and a grey light filtering through small windows. She was in a warehouse loft, and the memory of being in it once before skittered into sight and was gone.

  The wake atmosphere had lessened only slightly. Along with the headache, another Troop member moved in and evidenced. As he did, the woman “saw” an enormous trash heap: metal and paper, wire and wood, enclosed behind a tall mesh fence. On one of the stepfather’s excursions, looking for spare parts for the cars he repaired, he used to stop at many junkyards. The Troop member evidencing seemed to rise slowly from the juxtaposition of texture on texture, his body bent to meld with the various objects blanketing him. “Junkman.” The name lay in the woman’s mind. She caught a sense of him, as being the essence of all hiding, all “removal” from the world. She smiled, accepting him and all that he was, for he asked nothing except his right to stay hidden. That right seemed to be protected in some way, by Mean Joe.

  Mean Joe, with Sidney Poitier cool, had lugged something out of the car and into the freight elevator. He carried his burden gingerly into the dust-laden, run-down warehouse loft. The weight and beauty of the stark white collage had never been so apparent as when Mean Joe hefted it into place on the wall nearest the exit door. The Junkman looked happy. The woman knew then that he had created it and when she saw the children behind him, she knew for whom he’d created it.

  “I have something to tell you,” Elvira said.

  The woman turned away. The question of time, how much time she’d spent in these seedy quarters already, scared her: “It’s only a question of time. It won’t be long now. Eventually, I’ll get you.” The words were old ones, belonging to the stepfather. Time. The knowledge sat squarely in her head: it was not that she’d squandered her time somewhere. Her time had never existed. Everybody else in the world knew where their time went, they had certain things to show for it: a college education, the yardstick measurements on a doorjamb to indicate a growing child . . . memories.

  Elvira pressed closer and wouldn’t go away. The woman disappeared. The others argued among themselves. This warehouse, an investment made five years ago, was probably uninhabitable.

  “Screw that,” Sewer Mouth said. “We’ve lived in worse.”

  Elvira sat on the unpacked suitcases, estimating the space in the third-floor loft area to be around twelve hundred square feet. It was good space and, because there was no rent, they could buy a bed, a refrigerator, a hot plate, a few ferns to make Catherine happy, and perhaps a shovel for the bird droppings.

  * * *

  One hundred yards behind the warehouse, the train went down the tracks and rumbled away in the distance. The woman didn’t hear it. Darkness had fallen, had she slept? Her teeth hummed. There was no sense in brushing them; the humming signaled another gum infection. It was too much effort to haul out the baking soda and peroxide. Sometime later, she considered the effort it would take to get a phone and get the number to Stanley. It would, of course, have to be unlisted and unpublished. There was no reason to change practices now. The woman laughed, feeling quite unlike herself, and heard someone ask what it would be like to be herself. That made her laugh harder. Putting both hands over her mouth did not shut the sounds off. She inspected each of her hands carefully and received a conclusion: since the ring and the bracelet were familiar, maybe the hands were hers, too. She wore no watch and there came a misty recollection of throwing one out a car window. How many watches had there been? Many. But no time at all.

  She slept heavily atop the suitcases until morning.

  “You can’t come down from those suitcases,” Elvira said, “until the floors are cleaned.”

  “I hate you,” the woman said. “Go away.”

  “You’re only feeling what we all do when we first evidence to ourselves,” Elvira said.

  For a long moment the woman sat with a blank look on her face. Then she started to laugh because Elvira was sending her laughter.

  “You see?” Elvira turned on the radio and the music got loud. “Life is a joke. Learn to laugh at it. All along, you’ve said, most of the time, ‘my mother, my stepfather, my father.’ But the one to whom the parents belong is dead. None of us are related to anyone except ourselves.”

  Two days later, Ten-Four got ahold of the building superintendent.

  “George,” Ten-Four said to him, “we need the water turned on up there in the warehouse.”

  “I won’t be responsible,” George told her. “I’m not sure the pipes will hold water.”

  “Think of something, George.”

  Why, the woman wondered, did she feel as if she’d just said something rude and aggressive to somebody? She stared at the phone in her hand, wondering who she’d been trying to call. She shopped quickly, head down, and fled back to the car. Back at the warehouse, the rickety freight elevator rose shakily to the third floor. She hauled the bags out and dumped them inside the four dim, cavernous walls. Tomorrow the bed would be delivered.

  * * *

  “She’s moved out of the house, there’s been no trace of her for over a month.”

  Captain Albert Johnson agreed to check it out and closed his notebook.

  “One thing, Albert. If anyone of your officers were to find her, I’d rather they weren’t in uniform.”

  Albert grinned. “Too bad I’m not a black male and about twelve feet tall. Am I right?”

  “You are perceptive,” Stanley said.

  “Ever heard of a white multiple female having a black male personality before?”

  “I never heard of a lot of things,” Stanley said. “That doesn’t mean they’re not so.”

  “If she harms herself, they’ll lock her up. If she harms anyone else, she’ll be locked up. Nothing I can do about it.” Albert’s face was closed, he studied the floor car
efully.

  “If she’s alive.”

  “Yeah,” Albert said. “That, too.”

  * * *

  On one of the days when her mind did not sleep, the woman made a trip for cigarettes. After the gloom of the warehouse loft, bright sunlight came as a surprise. Elvira could not resist a test and when they came to an apartment complex on their left, the woman recognised the structure as one she’d lived in after leaving Norman eight years ago. With a seemingly perverse mind of its own, the car turned into the secondary driveway and moved slowly past brick buildings and a common pool. The complex to her left seemed familiar; it had to be the one. It struck her that while she had lived there and could recall the apartment layout and the decor, she could not recall entering or leaving it on any occasion.

  Something she’d mentioned months ago to Stanley came back. “I can remember, sometimes,” she said, “being on the school bus. Sometimes I can remember getting ready for school a couple of mornings, and being briefly in a couple of classes. But nowhere in my mind is there ever a memory of getting on or off the school bus.”

  “Somebody else remembers it,” Stanley had told her. “You’re struggling with one of the most terrifying facets of MPD. You may never understand, and neither will I, exactly where you go when somebody else comes out, or how they can operate completely free of your knowledge, but you will believe that it does happen. That belief won’t arrive in a blinding flash. You’ll simply encounter different pieces of evidence as you become more aware.”

  The woman stared at the apartment complex. The terror she experienced at that moment was something that the Weaver would never take away as long as she lived. She began to scream and cry and grip the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands.

  Once back at the warehouse but unable to stop the Mixmaster tremble, she scrambled into the bed and lay there, not daring to move. Someone specific seemed to tear along the edges of her mind, raging like a banshee.

  “Goddamn you, we’re losing the battle, the bastard is winning! The stepfather is still alive and we’re dying here in this stupid warehouse!”

  The children’s voices picked up on it, but from a distance only, as if she were repellent to them. They hung back, shrinking from her. The adult voices were closer, gathering war clouds of rage—hers and theirs.

  Kill him. It started as a chant and turned into a mantra. She couldn’t listen anymore. Her mind rejected everything, their reality and her own. She went to sleep.

  Some days, the fright started as far down as her toes. With the first glimpse of daylight it consumed her and stayed until she managed to fall asleep again. She slept a lot. She was scared a lot. But safe. There was no mail to worry about and no one knew that she now had a phone. She had no idea how long it had been since she had last called Stanley.

  “Have to get in shape, look decent, be neat first,” someone said.

  While pondering sudden anger at the hot plate resting on makeshift bookshelves next to the sink, she realised finally that somebody wished it were a gas stove. How did you stick your head into a hot plate?

  * * *

  Shaking the thermometer, the woman read it again and let it drop to the floor: 103°. The thermometer’s confirmation of illness wearied her. She burrowed deeper under the quilt and drifted off, with every bone and muscle aching. Later, a stranger looked back in the mirror over the porcelain sink, with a face like an overfed squirrel, eyes bloodshot, hair greasy and matted, and lips cracked dry. There did not seem to be a drop of moisture in her entire body. She drifted off again.

  “He’ll win if you don’t get out of that bed.”

  “Fuck off,” Sewer Mouth said.

  The woman had begun to like the swearing. She slept until the next morning when only someone’s need to urinate forced her, on deadened feet, back into the bathroom.

  * * *

  “She seems to be living in a warehouse,” Albert said. “A classic-car buff stores his antiques on the first two floors. She’s living on the third. County records say she owns the building and when I checked it out, there she was, in the driveway, hauling groceries. She creeps around the damn place like half a mouse.”

  “Does she have a phone?”

  “Unlisted, unpublished. Want me to go and get her?”

  “No.” Stanley thought a moment. “I’ll take it from here. And thank you, Albert.”

  * * *

  The black-and-white television picture flickered. The announcer’s voice punctuated the vastness of the warehouse loft. She lay on the bed with no desire to move, her body heavy with exhaustion and her mind vaguely centered on the television screen. The humanlike appendages of a gigantic, solid white turtle were moving in slow motion, producing a mesmerising effect.

  After the first few moments the woman found herself unable to wrench her eyes from the turtle. Its dreamy, trancelike motions were repeated until the pale, translucent skin seemed in danger of splitting. Eventually she realised that the Smithsonian segment of “Our Reptilian Friends” was over.

  She put on the flannel nightgown, shivering in the dampness of the big room. She did not know that her temperature had dropped; all she knew was that she did not ache so badly. She flicked off the bedside light, welcoming darkness and sleep. Her eyes were shut tight when it happened. As on a negative, the turtle was no longer a pale image but a darkening grey. It pumped its long, thick arms up and down, lowering and lifting itself, so slowly.

  And she was sitting up in bed, the animal sounds coming from her mouth. Because it wasn’t the reverse-image of the turtle above her, but the stepfather. It was his smell in her nostrils . . . it was his chest, his arms . . . lowering, lifting him above her face.

  The pattern for most sexually abused multiples was to deny recall, each time other selves presented it. The woman might in the future deny or reject many other presentations but she would never forget this one.

  Elvira turned on the light and waited patiently until the woman was hit with the full realisation. It was important that the room not be dark, that the music be loud. She turned the radio up and Jim Croce’s song “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” played full blast.

  The woman, with her face in the soft velveteen body of the teddy bear, didn’t have strength to reject anything. Several selves moved at once, gave her images of the sex act and let them lie there. Sister Mary Catherine’s revulsion came alive, screamed out loud.

  The woman couldn’t move. At what point had he first achieved penetration? How old had she been?

  The calm exploded. The woman ran from the bed and threw herself in the corner. She crouched there, wrapping the nightgown close.

  No one spoke.

  “Alright,” the woman screamed, filled to suffocation by the mind surfacing inside her own, “how old was the one to whom it happened?”

  “Pick one,” somebody said. “Pick any age.”

  The lace of the long flannel gown grazed her ankles; she shrieked, not wanting to be touched by anything or anyone. Through the night, she slept, awoke, crouching and freezing in the furthest corner of the enormous room, with the quilt over her head.

  “We’re almost there,” they said.

  She awoke one afternoon to find another snake in the bed, and looked at it dully, not caring whether it was real or not. The snake swam in a clear pool of water amongst fallen leaves. This time a complete, debilitating weariness precluded fright.

  Sometime that same week, the sensation in her mouth finally forced her to the mirror for a firsthand inspection. Only the sight of purple gums from which a yellow substance oozed drove her to haul out the peroxide and baking soda, which she mixed into a paste and applied gingerly with an old, soft toothbrush.

  Catherine laughed at the woman’s stricken face.

  “To hell with the dentist,” Catherine said. “See how that marvelous swelling takes away the tiny crow’s-feet around your eyes?”

  “You are quite disgusting,�
�� Lady Catherine Tissieu told her.

  “Leave me alone,” the woman said.

  They wouldn’t.

  They made her look at the mother, dating after they’d forced the stepfather out of the house, and inviting her to go along. How appealing it had seemed until she’d heard the strange sounds in the front seat of the car, the mother, obviously doing what she’d always told her daughter was evil and wrong. The woman, a teenager at the time, frozen solid next to her own date, could not see the mother from the back seat. What she did see eventually was that the mother was pregnant. Suddenly one day it had been very apparent, along with a hideous repugnance for her that nothing overcame. So she’d left the farmhouse, carrying the guilt along with her.

  “The only thing is,” Twelve said, “you’ve dumped the guilt on us. You’re blaming you and us.”

  The children’s small voices sounded angry. They began to cry, to talk about a teapot, about scalding hot tea. They shivered and cringed and seemed to be in pain. Their pain didn’t affect the woman; she couldn’t understand what they were talking about. She put her head on the pillow and went back to sleep.

  That night someone began to read aloud to the children.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “DO I know you?” Stanley was polite.

  “Sure you do, Charlie.” Elvira stared him in the eye for the first time since he’d entered the warehouse loft. She seldom called anyone by their correct name because doing anything according to the book scared her. Obeying rules rather than making her own gave her the feeling of being hemmed in, up against it, subject to somebody else’s authority and mercy. Edgar Allan Poe had said that as a name, “Charlie” always called up the image of a good man, that when one heard it, all apprehension fell away. She didn’t know if that were true or not, but she’d decided to deal with Stanley, using “Charlie” as a sort of shield belonging to herself alone.

  “Do you have a name?” Stanley asked.