The truth is, she can’t handle this, can’t handle Jack on her own anymore. She needs to put aside her own pride and bring someone in to help because it isn’t going to get any easier and she knows what’s coming: more anger, more confusion. The disease will continue to strip every bit of Jack away, and when it’s done, it will destroy his body. Like an autumn tree, he’s shedding his leaves, leaving bare branches behind, but for him, the new growth of spring will never come.
She wishes for a stroke or a heart attack, something quick to end his suffering—and hers—but as soon as the thought takes shape in her mind, guilt drapes itself across her shoulders, and she scrubs her face with her hands. This is the way the world breaks you. It takes everything you know and love and turns it inside out. It leaches the color from your hair, yellows your teeth, and curves your spine, and even though you wish you were the same person you’ve always been on the inside, you go grey and stained and frail there, too.
Stop. Get hold of yourself. You need a good night’s sleep, that’s all.
Tears burn and she lets them fall, unsure if she’s weeping for Jack or for herself or maybe for them both.
* * *
He’s pacing again. Living room to dining room to kitchen and back again, pausing at each window to peer outside, muttering incoherencies all the while. She does her best to ignore it, but when he shows no signs of stopping, she asks if he wants to go for a walk.
“No,” he says.
“Would you like to watch a movie with me?”
He tips his head to the side, then nods. “Okay.”
Once settled on the sofa, he pats the back of her hand. “Lena, I’m sorry I’m so forgetful sometimes.”
Her name. He used her name. A knot tightens in her chest, and she has to untangle her voice. “It’s okay, Jack. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She cups the side of his face in her palm, and although he doesn’t lean into her touch the way he used to, he doesn’t pull away.
* * *
Arms around an empty laundry basket, Helena walks past the bathroom and grimaces. Jack’s toothbrush, still holding a bright blue swoop of toothpaste, is on the edge of the sink, but there’s no sign of Jack. Leaving the basket in the hall, she checks their room, but it’s empty as well. She was only in the guest bedroom long enough to put the freshly washed sheets back on the bed. How did he get past her without her hearing a thing?
Once again, she finds him downstairs by the French doors.
“Jack, what are you doing? It’s time to get ready for bed.”
“No,” he says, reaching for the lock. “It’s time for me to go. They said so.”
“Let’s go back upstairs now. You need to brush your teeth.”
He whirls around, his face a snarl. “You can’t stop me. This has nothing to do with you. It’s only for me.”
She takes his arm. His mouth twists again; he puts his hands on her shoulders and growls. “No,” he shouts, shoving her away.
Her arms flail, but she grabs only air and lands hard on her tailbone with a sharp cry. The door thumps shut, and she struggles to her feet, breathing through her mouth, ignoring the starburst of pain in her lower spine. Her fault, this is her fault. She should’ve replaced the locks with keyed dead bolts. What if he falls, what if he gets lost and hurts himself? Or worse?
The night air is chill, full dark with no hint of sunrise, and clouds veil an almost-full moon. Too dark to see much of anything but shadows and the pale blur of his pajamas.
“Jack, please stop. Come back. It’s too dark outside.”
But he doesn’t stop, doesn’t look back, simply keeps moving across the lawn faster than she’s seen him move in years, moving as steady and sure as if it were a sunny day. He reaches the path and, with a flash of striping, disappears into the trees.
She scrambles across the kitchen to the junk drawer, pawing frantically through the contents. At the very back she finds what she’s looking for: a small flashlight. “Small, but bright,” Jack said when he bought it at the hardware store, long before his diagnosis. She pauses by the phone. She should call Cathy or even 911, but no one will arrive in time and if he wanders off the path … She checks to make certain the flashlight works and shakes her head. No, Jack won’t go far. He won’t. Not in the dark.
Beneath her feet, the ground is cold and her nightgown isn’t nearly warm enough, but she’s wasted enough time already. She sweeps the light across the lawn; the last thing she needs is to trip and fall. Pressing her lips together tight, she takes to the path. A few steps in and the shadows hang even heavier. She scans the trees with the light. No Jack.
Impossible. He has no light. He can’t have gotten that far. She trains her light on the path and keeps moving, her back awash in a cold sweat, her mouth pinched and acidic. She calls out his name, gets no response. The path turns to trail, and still she sees nothing but darkness and shadows. No sign of her husband. The woods are silent, unnaturally so. Shouldn’t there be small animals scurrying about or insects or something? This quiet is absolute and terrifying.
She nearly stumbles over his discarded slippers, but they alleviate some of her panic, for even in the dark he’s managing to stick to the path. On the other side of the branch Jack previously helped her with, she sees both foot and handprints. The shake of her hands makes the light bounce, but there’s no blood on the ground, so if he fell, maybe he didn’t fall hard.
“Jack?”
When she reaches the bottom of the incline, she calls his name again. She needs to go back and call for help. She was a fool to try to find him on her own. Stupid woman. Stupid, prideful woman.
Then she hears Jack’s voice, low and unintelligible, but distinctly his, and a wave of relief crashes over her.
“I’m coming, Jack. Stay there. Please stay there.”
“I’m here,” he says.
On the incline, her thighs start to burn, and her feet slip on twigs and scree. Halfway up, she hears Jack say, “Will it take me to the right house? Is it the right door?”
“It is all doorways,” another voice says, a guttural, inhuman voice, one she doesn’t hear with her ears but with her bones, each syllable pressing its indelible shape into her marrow. Every instinct says run, but she can’t. She can’t.
“You will carry it until it’s time,” the inhuman voice says. “The animal wasn’t strong enough.”
A pale, sickly light spills over the top of the incline.
“Oh,” Jack says.
Ignoring the ache in her legs, Helena scrambles the rest of the way up. Jack stands at the bottom, his arms slack at his sides, and in front of him, the doe. The light is seeping from the corners of its white eyes, the way sun finds the edge of a window blind. There’s no sign of the speaker, no sign of anyone or anything else.
The doe’s body ripples, its eyes expand, and more light spills out, a greenish-yellow light that hangs heavy in the air. The sound of tearing fabric—no, worse than that, tearing flesh—breaks the quiet, and the doe’s body topples, landing with a soft thump. In its place hovers a fist-sized ovoid of the blackest black haloed within the strange light. It begins to slowly rotate, absorbing the light and expanding to the size of a basketball. When the light is gone, the sphere resembles an oil slick dotted with flickering lights. Starlight comes to mind, but it isn’t that exactly. It’s something more, something bigger than she can put a name to. A truth, a nightmare, a doorway.
Yet for what?
Jack holds out his arms.
“No,” she cries, but the word shivers into the air and is silenced.
The sphere collapses, draping over his skin like a blanket of space. It seeps into his flesh one galaxy at a time, leaving strange whirls and spheres in between, patterned as if they, too, are galaxies, but those her eyes are not able—or not allowed—to discern. A scream tears its way from her lips, but if it holds a sound, it lives only in her mind. Pressure thuds behind her temples, sharp jabs blade through her head, and she fa
lls to her knees, dropping the flashlight and covering her eyes. She hears: a slow thrum, a symphony of voices speaking in a language she wasn’t meant to hear and can’t understand, the sound of strange and ponderous bodies moving closer then away.
Her ears pop and silence falls once more. She scrabbles in the dirt for the flashlight and rises on rubbery legs, her breath a rasp of sandpaper laced with sobs. The air is thick with the stench of a rotting carcass; underneath that, a peculiar metallic heat.
“Jack?”
He turns toward her voice, his shoulders slumped. As far as she can see, no trace of the black remains.
“They couldn’t fix me,” he says. “I’m too broken.”
A lump in her throat steals her voice away.
You will carry it until it’s time.
Looking down into his eyes, all she sees is Jack, lost and afraid, but she feels the presence of something else, something other.
What is he carrying inside him, and what will happen when it’s time? How is she supposed to pretend everything is fine? This isn’t fair. It isn’t right. He’s too old for this, whatever this is. They both are. Haven’t they suffered enough?
She swallows hard, her thumb tracing a circle around the flashlight’s on-off switch. She could turn around right now and leave him here. No one would know. She could call the police in the morning and tell them he wandered out sometime in the night without her hearing. He wouldn’t be the first, or the last, to do such a thing.
But how can she do that to him? Even if he isn’t wholly Jack, he hasn’t been Jack for a long time. Still, she remains where she is, staring into the shadows.
“I’m cold,” Jack says, his voice trembling. “And I don’t feel well. I want to go home now. Please, Lena, can we go home?”
Publication History
“Tooth, Tongue, and Claw” — originally published in November 2015 in Nightscript I
“Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden in My Smile” — originally published in May 2016 in Black Static
“On the Other Side of the Door, Everything Changes” — originally published in June 2016 in Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories
“This Is the Way I Die” — originally published in May 2014 in Nightmare Magazine
“The Hands That Hold, the Lies That Bind” — originally published in January 2016 in Cemetery Dance Online
“Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant’s Tale” — originally published in August 2015 in Apex Magazine
“The Judas Child” — originally published in December 2015 in Nightmare Magazine
“S Is for Soliloquy” — originally published in May 2015 in B Is for Broken
“The Floating Girls: A Documentary” — originally published in September 2014 in Jamais Vu
“Take a Walk in the Night, My Love” — originally published in November 2016 in The Madness of Dr. Caligari
“Falling Under, Through the Dark” — originally published in May 2015 in Black Static
“The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter” — originally published in January 2014 in Strange Horizons
“Umbilicus” — originally published in April 2016 in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu
“A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take” — originally published in December 2014 in Lightspeed Magazine
“Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home” — originally published in July 2016 in Lost Signals
“Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice” — originally published in October 2016 in Eternal Frankenstein
“In the Spaces Where You Once Lived” — originally published in May 2016 in Autumn Cthulhu
Acknowledgments
I’ve been here before, staring at a blank Word doc, terrified I’m going to forget to thank someone. Terrified they might then read this and wonder why I didn’t include them. It’s more frightening than imagining someone reading the stories and hating them. Then again, that’s dreadful, too.
Thank you to Jason Sizemore for being willing to do this again. I hope this collection does well enough to make you not regret that decision.
Thank you to Lesley Conner for helping me sort through all the maybe stories in addition to everything else you did. I’m still sorry a few of the stories made you cry.
I might not be telling the truth about being sorry.
Thank you to the editors who first published these stories: C.M. Muller; Andy Cox; Doug Murano and D. Alexander Ward; John Joseph Adams and Wendy Wagner; Blu Gilliand, Brian Freeman, and Richard Chizmar; Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner; Rhonda Parrish; Paul Michael Anderson; Joe Pulver; Julia Rios; Paula Guran; Max Booth and Lori Michelle; Ross Lockhart; and Mike Davis. It was an honor and pleasure to work with each one of you, and I hope I have the chance to do so again.
Thank you to Kristi DeMeester and Paul Michael Anderson for being honest and tough when you beta read my stories. Your comments and critiques are more helpful than you know. Always.
Thank you to my family for their love and support.
And finally, thank you for buying this book. Without you, none of this would be possible. I hope you enjoyed the stories. I hope the time you spent reading them was worth it. Most of all, I hope they made you feel.
DAW
August 2017
About the Author
Damien Angelica Walters is also the author of Sing Me Your Scars and Paper Tigers. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls.
Copyright © 2018 by Damien Angelica Walters
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN 978-1937009-61-8 (TPB)
Also available as a DRM-free eBook.
Apex Publications, PO Box 24323, Lexington, KY 40524
Visit us at www.apexbookcompany.com.
Published at Smashwords.
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