Charlie bent down and made sure the sheet or quilt covered all areas of her body. It would seem too disrespectful to just throw the dirt right on her. He scrambled out of the hole before panic attacked him.
He stood there, looking down at her and feeling like something was missing. Mother was not the most religious of persons but Charlie felt like some type of prayer was in order only he didn’t know any prayers. Suddenly, he ran upstairs and grabbed the two books out of her room. He dropped the romance in there with her and said, “In case the Beautiful Place has a restroom.” Then he flipped around the Bible until he found “Psalm 23.” Nervously, he read it aloud over her grave, not fully understanding it and not entirely sure he wanted to.
With that, he closed the Bible up and delicately lowered it into the grave until it rested against Mother’s still heart.
“God bless you, Mom. You deserve so much better than this.”
And just before he threw the first shovelful of dirt on top of her, a streak of sunlight came through one of the basement windows, impossibly bright, and shone across the dirt floor and across his mother’s brightly colored quilt. Not pausing, he went about hurriedly shoveling the dirt onto her, trying to capture as much of the sunlight as possible in the dirt before the sun went away.
By noon, Charlie finished placing the last of the dirt and packing it down. The sun had long since fled the window. Charlie thought about marking Mother’s grave somehow. He thought about putting her name or something like, “Here lies the sun,” or, “She rests in the Beautiful Place,” but it seemed too risky. He didn’t want any potential owners to know someone was buried down here. He settled on a cross, two very thin lines made with the tip of the shovel, and figured that would have to do. If anybody actually happened to notice that, they’d just think it was one of those spooky religious coincidences.
Charlie breathed a long sigh of exhausted relief. He picked up his instruments and headed back out toward the garage, careful to shut the basement door behind him.
Braving the kitchen, he crossed over to the sink and, from the cabinets below it, found the jar where he had put all the money from Mother’s social security checks. He cradled that in his left arm, added the half-carton of cigarettes from the top of the refrigerator, snatched the car keys from the small brass hook in the wall and started out for the car, bending on the porch to pick up the atlas.
Sunruined
1.
Sunlight
The California sunlight pouring in through the windows seemed meaningless. Paul Ward listened to the voice squawking on the other end of the phone. The voice belonged to his sister, Dorie, and it struggled to sound sympathetic but it came out all wrong because sympathy did not suit its owner. When Dorie stopped talking, Paul hung up the phone, not fully aware of everything she had said. He found a chair and sat down, his legs weak. His father had died—three months after his mother. The official diagnosis had been inoperable cancer but Paul figured it could just as well have been loneliness and sorrow. Tomorrow, he would have to catch a plane to Ohio.
He sat in the chair, sunlight all around him, his hopelessness struggling to drink it up and turn it black.
2.
Dorie
Early spring outside. Cold, but not the bitter Ohio winter cold.
After the funeral, Paul followed Dorie back to the their childhood home on Birch Street. Now they stood in the living room that nobody lived in anymore. The house was completely empty. Paul hadn’t seen Dorie since his mother’s funeral. Even though that was only three months ago, she looked like she had aged ten years. Always a severe tight-faced woman, her hair had gone even grayer, the circles under her intense, probing eyes were even darker.
She passed him a manila envelope. It wasn’t until she used her left hand, drawing his attention to it, that he was reminded of the fact she only had three fingers. Her pinky and ring fingers were missing and she had a burn scar extending halfway up to her elbow. He couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. Some kind of accident. He was only about four or five at the time. Dorie was ten years older than him.
“There is the will and the check for half of the auction earnings,” she said, her voice robotic, harsh.
“You sold everything, didn’t you?”
“He had been in the hospital for the last two months. The doctors knew he wouldn’t be coming home. Stop pretending you would have been interested in any of it.”
“It was just an observation.”
“I never could figure out why you hated them so much.”
“I never hated them. I just... had a separate life to live. That’s all.”
Outside, the rain spattered against the windows.
“Selling the house?” he asked.
“Yes. You’ll get half.”
Then he asked a question he had never asked before even though he had always wondered what the answer would be. He pointed to the small bedroom in the back of the house and said, “Why didn’t anyone ever use that room?”
“Mother never told you?”
“She wasn’t as close to me as she was to you.”
“That was going to be the nursery for their first born. He never made it home from the hospital and they just left it empty as a sort of... memorial.”
“Did you ever think Mom and Dad were a little bit odd?”
“I’m not getting into this with you, Paul. Let them rest. You can stop slandering them now. Have a good time in California.”
And then she turned and left, heading out into the tempestuous weather.
3.
A Memory
Paul had looked into the room before but he couldn’t remember ever being in the room and he only really remembered looking into it the one time.
He had been seven. Just old enough to have some really vivid, terrifying nightmares he always remembered in their entirety. After one of these nightmares, in the middle of the night, he got out of bed and went to his parents’ room. They were not in their bed. He thought this was strange because they always went to bed at the same time as the children. Once they said it was bedtime then the only sound in the house came from Dorie’s radio inanely spewing out Top 40 hits. Thinking about Dorie listening to that kind of stuff now made him smile a little bit on the inside—imagining something within her being soothed by all that was common and shallow.
He had wandered through the darkened house, gently calling for his parents. They were not in any room. That left only the empty room to be searched. He had no idea why the room remained empty. He hadn’t really thought about it. He just kind of assumed their family didn’t really need the extra space. Nevertheless, the room had always given him the creeps and he was afraid to go all the way in.
He approached the room and cracked the door.
He looked in.
He did not see his parents in the room. He could hardly see anything. The room was too bright. He didn’t know why his parents would leave the lights on in an empty room all night, especially since his father, with stringent frugality, faithfully turned off every light in the house when they went to bed.
He closed the door and went back upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, still having no idea where they were. He was a little bit frightened but not terrified because he didn’t think anything that bad could ever really happen to his parents. He crawled into their bed, waiting for them, thinking of where they might be. Maybe just to a neighbor’s. Maybe they were in the basement for some reason or the other. That was probably it. He hadn’t checked the basement. Or maybe they had been in that awful empty room and he just hadn’t seen them because it was too bright. It had to be something like that.
Paul had fallen asleep before his parents came to bed.
Upon waking he found himself in his own bed and knew it was his parents who put him there.
4.
The Empty Room
Now it was the middle of the night many years later and Paul left his hotel on Main Street, getting in his car to drive back to his parents’ ho
use and not having the slightest idea as to why he was doing this. Thick black clouds obliterated the moon and he kept the heat cranked up in his car, driving through the streets of the town and remembering why he hated his parents so much. Most people would have said it was because they had put him in rehab when he was seventeen for what they had seen as alcoholism and what he had seen as being a teenager. True, this had wiped out his last year of high school and stigmatized him beyond belief but he didn’t think that was the reason he hated them. And he did hate them. He had lied to Dorie earlier. But he thought it was for a completely different reason than forced rehab.
He hated them because he never really felt loved. It was that simple. Maybe it was juvenile. Maybe it was self-pity. Maybe it was even untrue. But he didn’t think so. His parents had always seemed preoccupied. Like there was something more immediate and more important than he and Dorie. He had always been a sensitive person. He felt things. He felt things when they were there and he felt the absence of things when they were not there.
Reaching the house, he had no problem gaining admittance—he still had the key on his keychain from his teenage years. He opened the door and walked into the empty house, the ghosts of distant years pressing down on his shoulders. He didn’t bother shutting the front door all the way. He didn’t think he would be there very long. He wasn’t even sure exactly why he had come.
Only he was. He was sure. He was going to look in the empty room. He was going to look in there just to convince himself it was a normal room, just like every other room. And then he was going to leave. He was going to leave feeling like some grand secret had been lifted from his brain and then he was going to catch the first plane back to California and put this whole godforsaken past behind him.
It was ridiculous, he knew, but his heart quickened as he reached the door to the empty room. This was not a big deal. This was not as traumatic as losing his parents should have been but he felt a greater surge of emotion as he clutched the cool doorknob in his hand. Sure, open up the door, see the darkened empty room, erase every childhood fear he had about this room and then go back home to begin forgetting and forgiving because, really, he thought those things would have to be synonymous to him. Forgiving. Forgetting. When all was forgotten, all would be forgiven.
He turned the knob and swung the door inward.
Light stung his eyes.
His heart hammered in his chest as he tried to discern the source of all that fantastic light.
It came from the window.
Sunlight. And now that he stood there in the room, it didn’t seem that bright at all. Just odd. For sunlight to be pouring in through a window after midnight. That had to be impossible. Impossible, yes, but it felt kind of nice.
Very nice.
Exquisite.
Yes. That was how he thought of it. Exquisite. He stood there in the sunlight pouring in through the window. The same sunlight that had poured in through the same window for many many years and he saw it radiate off his skin, sneak in through his skin, lifting his mood, lightening his memories, erasing sadness.
The sunlight had meaning again. A burst of meaning, shooting through him, creating a curious revelatory sensation that made him feel like he could create or destroy anything he wanted to.
And then he was gone. No longer standing in the empty room.
5.
The Land of Laughing Children
And no longer looking at the exquisite sunlight.
The sunlight was gone entirely, replaced with illumination that was somehow more eerie. It was like the wan light afforded by an eclipse or perhaps that found on a clear night with a full moon.
He didn’t know exactly what he was looking at. In front of him, towering over him, was a mansion. It was a prototypical mansion, very Italianate and symmetrical, with eight white plaster columns supporting a second story balcony. He had no desire to go into the mansion. For some reason, he knew what he would find in there. A lot of old furniture covered with sheets. Dusty mirrors that turned every image spectral.
To his left dripped a huge weeping willow tree. To his right, a gnarled live oak twisted out its branches, nearly parallel with the ground. Farther off to his left was either the ocean or a lake. Whatever it was it did not wave or even lap at the shore and it seemed to loom with its deep cobalt blue depths slightly above the ground he stood on, threatening to wash over him and consume him and everything in his surroundings at any moment.
Yet, the feeling he had felt back in the empty room remained. He felt like he walked in some kind of revelatory vision, one that he seemed entirely cognizant of at the time, like when you’re having a dream and you know that you are dreaming and you do not want the dream to end. From somewhere, behind the house possibly, he heard the sound of children laughing.
A boy popped out from underneath the willow tree. Paul quickly took him in. The first thing he thought was that the boy looked Amish. His brown hair was cropped in a strange fashion and he wore heavy black clothes over a dirty white shirt. Then Paul noticed the boy’s bare feet. They seemed too large and the nails were long.
“Can’t catch me!” the boy said and took off running to the right of the mansion.
Paul thought he could catch him. He took off running after the boy, suddenly aware of the cool soft grass on his feet that were also bare.
He chased the boy around the house and came to a stop.
There were other boys there. And they all looked just like this first one. Paul started to count and stopped when he got to ten. There were more than that.
Paul’s good feeling went away. He didn’t know exactly why except that something just didn’t seem right anymore. Something didn’t seem right and it didn’t seem good.
“Wanna play ball?” a boy at the front of the pack said.
“I don’t think I do,” Paul said, already backing away. Maybe if he could just get to the front of the mansion then he could find that beam of perfect light and go back into the empty room because even that place, that place and all of its silent, inherent scariness, was better than this place.
“I think you do,” the boy said and hurled something that was not a ball at Paul’s head.
The rock struck him above the right eye and consciousness swam around him, a grim nausea tickling the back of his brain.
He turned to run.
Another rock caught him in the back of his head and sent him to the ground.
The children were upon him and he kicked, trying to scoot along on the grass, trying to get away, finding it absurd that he was being beaten by a group of children. Quickly, they bound his arms and his legs with a thick rope. Then they hoisted him up and carried him.
Paul screamed.
It was the first time in his life he had ever screamed.
Looking up at the black moonless sky, he screamed and screamed, the sound of his voice feeling like the only power he had.
The boys put him down on a wooden slab. It was a table of sorts. A fire crackled somewhere beside him but the boys wouldn’t let him turn his bloodied head. Instead they held it straight, so that he stared forward.
Sitting at the head of the table, looking at him with only a vague sense of familiarity, were his mother and father.
Suddenly, things made sense to him. They made sense and he put things together in his head but he couldn’t blurt them out fast enough.
No. His parents had never loved him.
And he thought he knew what had taken Dorie’s fingers.
Thought he knew how she had come about the burns.
And he thought he knew why she was able to love their parents and he was not.
She had understood.
She understood about the first born. About the first born being the only real child his parents had ever wanted and when that first born child had died, a part of his parents had died too because they realized something about mortality and then maybe somehow they found this place that allowed them to escape mortality and, feeling the boys’ hands on his
body, Paul knew they had come here again and again. Here, to this place where the first child would always live. Where he would always be born into perfection.
Again and again.
These were the children his parents had loved.
And why not? Paul thought. They would never get old. They would grow to whatever age his parents wanted them to grow to and then they would stop and they would never die. They would never hate. They would only love. Unconditionally. Regardless of what the parents wanted them to do.
Paul started to say something to his parents, sitting there with their cold eyes measuring him, but he was yanked up by the throat and carried over to the crackling fire.
Dorie had got out. Somehow, she had escaped this fate. But Dorie had always been the strong one and, as the first of the flames licked his bare feet, Paul knew he would never feel the sunlight again.
Table of Contents
The Jackthief
The Screaming Orchard
Glowers Point
Cruel Women with Whiplike Smiles
The Smoke of Samuel
Sad Clown, Kentucky
Sunruined
Sunruined: Horror Stories Page 9
