We Live Inside Your Eyes

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  “Won’t he be back soon?” he asked his mother, quietly.

  “Do what you’re told,” she snapped without turning to look at him, and that was good. As long as the coldness of her gaze was not on him, he could be brave, continue to make his case. As soon as she looked at him, she would kill the words in his mouth, and he would know he was doomed.

  “The weather’s really bad,” he said, and glanced out the window. Beyond the frosted glass, thick snowflakes fell like feathers from a ruptured pillow. “He’ll probably want to get home before it gets any worse.”

  He jumped as the spatula made a sharp clang against the side of the frying pan. “For fuck sake, Liam,” she said in a dangerous voice, “If I have to ask you again, I’ll put your head through the wall.”

  He rose quickly, careful not to let the legs of his chair scrape against the stone floor. His parents hated that. He didn’t like it much either, but it’s not like it was ever intentional. He cast a longing glance at the half-eaten bowl of soggy cornflakes and the slice of cold toast and marmalade sitting untouched next to it and went to get his coat and boots on. At the doorway, he looked back at his mother. Although he was only ten years old, he could remember a time when she didn’t look so pale and faded, like a photograph left too long in the sun. There were still memories of her lit from within by the light of summer. He remembered her love. Now, as he looked upon a lank-haired witch glaring down into a frying pan full of blackened, twisted things, he feared he would never know that love again.

  “And tell him if he doesn’t come home, he can stay with whatever whore will have him,” she said through an ugly sneer that made her face look like a cheap mask melting in the heat from the stove.

  Silently, Liam exited the room.

  ✽✽✽

  Winter had made a monochrome gradient of the world, broken here and there by dark strips where the snow had fallen like flesh from the withered arms of the trees and the twisted remains of broken streetlights, which bent over the street like the bones of some long-dead giant. Liam was bundled up in a thick woolen jacket, but the holes he’d worn in the elbows allowed the icy wind to creep in, chilling him where he stood. Over his scarf, the wet wool sent bolts of discomfort through him whenever it brushed against his teeth.

  He looked down at the path. The snow had all but erased his father’s footprints, leaving only faint impressions behind.

  A series of muffled thumps behind him. Liam turned around. The house was an old Cape Cod, as dilapidated as everything else in this part of the city: a squat dispirited structure, the gaps in the once-white siding so stained with green mold, it looked like the side of an old boat. The inverted triangle of his mother’s vulpine face, contorted in anger, filled the kitchen window. Mercifully, the thick glass and the soughing of the wind immunized him from the poison of her words, but the jab of her finger made the message clear enough: Get moving.

  Breath held, shivering for reasons other than the cold, he did as instructed and stepped off the stoop.

  The snow reached his knees, which made traversing the short path to the street all that more difficult, but he was thankful for the delay. The world on this side of the chain-link gate may not have been a paradise, but it was still home, and home was where his sanctuary was: up the stairs and down the end of the hall. It may as well have been another country. That’s where dreams were allowed; the nightmares stayed downstairs.

  Aware without looking that his mother’s eyes were on him, he trudged onward toward the gate.

  ✽✽✽

  The street was too narrow to allow the passage of vehicles, even if such a thing were possible, and the snow made it narrower still, which did nothing to alleviate Liam’s impression of it as a gullet that would feed him into the ugly belly of the neighborhood. Once upon a time, this part of the city had thrived, an extension of the bustling metropolis that had long ago been rendered inaccessible by a wall of kudzu vines and weeds, which, almost unnoticed, had sprouted from the earth from between the remains of the old steel and grain mills before tearing them down and fortifying the wall. Before nature had reclaimed it, this had been a vital industrial outpost on the outskirts of the city, but with the death of industry and the departure of men whose aspirations ran further than drink, drugs, and murder, it had become a dead zone, a literal wrong side of the tracks, themselves buried beneath the tangles of blackened vine and twisted steel

  To Liam’s left, stood a rank of dead, blank-faced houses, their eyes lightless, the caps of their porch rooves pulled low as if in shame, open maws empty of anything but dust and dark. Discarded toys half buried by the snow made an incongruously colorful cemetery of the yards, rusted swing-sets like shriveled scale models of all that remained of the mills which had once served as the district’s thriving heart.

  To the right, a sharp decline led down to all that remained of the train tracks, the veins through which life had coursed through this outpost. In places, some unknown force had ripped the tracks up and twisted them back in on themselves. The gravel had long been scattered. Beyond, the land fell away, became an industrial wasteland masked by the drifts. Here there were no children building snowmen or throwing snowballs or sledding. Everything was quiet, everything was buried. This did not surprise Liam. It was, after all, a Sunday, and in places such as these, places in which all that’s left is faith, Sundays meant reverence. Outward signs of joy not directly affiliated with the gods would have been considered an affront.

  Liam shivered, the cold now deep within his bones, his hands chilled beneath the gloves. He welcomed the discomfort, however, for it kept him from thinking about what he had seen the last time his mother had forced him to fetch his father.

  Open your mouth about this, Liam, and it’ll be the last time you’ll be able to.

  The houses drifted silently by and his school hove into view. Liam hated the school almost as much as he hated church (though he would die before he’d admit such a thing out loud), the tavern, and the neighborhood itself. School was prison, the walls speckled with some foul-smelling mineral deposit that glowed blue in the halflight. The hallway floors were bowed upward as if they’d built it atop the back of a sleeping giant. Few of the classroom lights worked and the teachers all appeared as if they’d been raised from the dead: pallid, drawn, their voices those of people who have found themselves in some terrible dream. The bathrooms smelled of brine; the chalkboards appeared to ripple when written upon, as if made of tar. To anyone else, it would have been a thing from nightmare. To Liam, it was the place of his education, though as he grew older, he had started to question the catechisms and syllabi to which he was being exposed. They seemed antiquated and decidedly cruel.

  The school was an enormous Italianate Victorian, the structure much too big for the two dozen or so students who went there, an anachronism whose façade seemed to suggest a smug awareness of its incongruity. The upper floors had been sealed off with strict warnings to all students not to trespass, which of course Liam had, and though he had found nothing but an endless series of faltering rooms stacked full of ancient books, he hadn’t felt quite the same since. “The dust found its way inside me,” he’d written on his sketchpad after returning home that day, but he had no idea what that was supposed to mean. He didn’t even remember writing it or drawing the picture of the janitor with the arms growing out of his mouth. In one of the old man’s hands, he had drawn an alarm clock.

  Liam looked away from the school. At the far end of the neighborhood, barely visible through the blizzard, stood the church. Even from here it looked like a face with hollow, admonishing eyes and a gaping mouth, the head atop the body he was now traversing like a tick. As much as he feared the school, the church absolutely terrified him, for surely if this part of the city had a black heart, a source of all its hated life, it was there within the unnaturally thick walls of the crumbling church. His parents had raised him to pray, to revere the gods that dwelled inside that place, and, as he was a good child and afraid of parents and
gods alike, he had obeyed, might have continued to do so if not for his mother.

  It was a day he would never forget. The Day of Leaves. He had been sitting in his room, daydreaming, the pencil in his hand moving of its own accord, sketching. His mother had burst into the room and slammed the door behind her, startling him. Her nose was bleeding, and her eyes were wide. She looked like a wild thing, feral. It was the first time he had seen her look this way, but it wouldn’t be the last. On that day, his body had tensed as she rushed toward him, but rather than strike or admonish the boy, she had grabbed him by the shoulders and brought her face close to his. Her breath had smelled sour, toxic, alien.

  “You must listen to me, Liam,” she’d said in a tone he wasn’t sure he had ever heard before. Pleading, almost whining. “You must listen to your mother now, do you understand?”

  Confused and frightened, he’d somehow managed a nod.

  “Good, good. That’s a good boy.” She sat down next to him, her skin reeking of smoke and ash. Her hair was tangled, the edges singed. She kept pulling at it as she spoke. “I don’t want you going to church anymore. I don’t want you going anywhere your father goes, okay?”

  “Okay,” he’d said, because there was nothing else he could say.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.” Given his feelings on the subject, it was not a difficult promise to make. He appeared to be the only child not enthused by the prospect of further visits to a monstrous building that made his head hurt. He could have gone forever never smelling that sulfur smell again, or sitting on those mildewed pews, or looking upon the strange upside-down effigy with the goat’s head someone had hung above the altar. He would be happy to never again hear the organ that only played tunes better suited to old ice cream trucks even when nobody was playing it. No, he would be perfectly happy to never set foot inside such a place again. Up until that moment, the only thing that had kept him from obeying his instincts in that regard had been his parents’ intervention.

  “You don’t know what it is. What they’re doing to us. What they’ve already done to your father. You must stay away from there and you must stay away from him. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be safer in your room where nothing has to change.”

  “Okay.”

  She had shaken him one more time to be sure the words had reached him and then, satisfied, she did something she would never do again: she kissed him lightly on his brow. It burned where her lips had touched his skin. Then she was gone.

  He thought that day might have been the last one in which his mother had shown him any love. Though there had been far better days in the beginning before they reopened the church and tore the light from the sky and the color from the world, he still considered the Day of Leaves a good one because she had still cared. She had even kissed him!

  But soon the poison got to her too, changed her, and while she continued to resist—sometimes so much he could feel it radiating in warm waves from her skin—she was no longer the same woman now. It was only a matter of time before she started going to church again, and then she’d make him go too. And gods only knew how they would be made to pay for straying.

  The school lurched away from him, an explosion of vines separating supposed innocence from the world of the adults. Here, propped atop cracked concrete sidewalks, was McMahon’s, the town hall, The Elder’s House, the police station, and finally Ned’s Grocery Store. Stone facades leaked viscous fluid from the cracks; fungus hemmed the bottoms. The rooves had sunken in the middle as if under the weight of something enormous and unseen. The breeze tore wisps of smoke from the slanted chimneys. On the opposite side of the road, a six-foot high stone fence topped by wrought iron railings blocked the view of the marsh but not the turbulent motion of the phosphorescent air above it. Green and yellow lights pulsated within the miasma. Tall withered trees that had grown up through the muck only to die looked like the masts of shipwrecks. And perhaps some of them were. The history of all but the marsh was known. Nobody in the neighborhood was permitted to know more, or worse, to venture beyond the fence, and nobody had ever tried. At least, that was the official story. Liam had heard whispers about foolish souls who had braved the marsh, their inevitable demise accompanied by the sound of something immense and soggy shifting itself to accommodate the induction of more life to be processed into nutrients. Others said that a contributing factor to the death and decay of this part of the city had been the derailment of a train ferrying toxic materials, which Liam supposed might explain the presence of a marsh within the confines of a city, the strange fog, and the things rumored to live in its depths.

  All Liam knew was that it smelled like wet dog and saltwater.

  Against the wall stood a row of scarecrows, or rather the remains of them. On the Day of Leaves, these creatures had their burlap chests stuffed with dead vegetation before they were set alight. Now all that remained were the charred crosses and twisted shreds of material that called to mind the burnt bacon and eggs on his mother’s stove. The scarecrow’s hoods, though blackened by the flames, retained their shape. The sheep skulls that had been placed inside those hoods would be there for always. Only the straw bodies would be replaced.

  And at the north end of the neighborhood, a twelve-foot wall of dead, twisted trees and vines at its back like some kind of cape, sat the church, watching him with stained glass eyes. The longer he stared, the more it seemed to tip its steepled hat at him, as if in acknowledgment. Lights flickered within as the last lingering penitents made their way through the aisles.

  Without transition, it grew dark in an instant, long shadows yawning toward him from the open maw of the church.

  Liam quickly averted his gaze and battled his way through the drifts to the pub.

  ✽✽✽

  There were half a dozen men inside, all of them clustered around the bar, all of them hunched over pints of whatever heady brown slop passed as ale. They fell silent as he entered, as if whatever they’d been discussing before his arrival was something not meant for his ears. He recognized them all as his neighbors, but if they recognized him in turn, it didn’t show. All he saw were wary deep-set eyes over pale faces and stained beards. A fire crackled in a large open hearth in the corner, but the heat was occluded by a trio of men who were watching their shadows dance upon the wall.

  McMahon’s head rose like a gray egg above the cluster of men at the bar. His face was a mass of lines, his eyes like black pebbles in a stream. Tattoos of mermaids crawled up both arms as he braced them on the mahogany bar and scowled. “This is no place for you.”

  Feeling as if the attention of the whole room was on him, though only McMahon was looking at him directly, Liam swallowed and cast a hurried glance around at the men, hoping he might locate his father among them and therefore avoid having to engage McMahon in conversation. But his father wasn’t here.

  “I’m looking for—”

  “I know who you’re looking for. He’ll be home when he’s ready, and you can tell your mother that too. Haven’t you learned your lesson by now?”

  Again, Liam looked around. Clearly his father was here, somewhere, but he had already scanned the faces, or, when not made available for his study, the coats, and had come up empty. Where, then, was he? He put this question to McMahon, whose ruddy face seemed to darken with every second measured by the raven-faced clock above the bar.

  “I told you to go home,” he snapped. “And you’d better do it before you cause us any more trouble.”

  Liam stood immobile, helpless. If he returned home without his father, his mother would beat him to within an inch of his life. If he stayed, there was every chance McMahon would do the same. So, he said the only thing he could think of to buy him some time.

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “Go outside in the snow,” said McMahon.

  Then, rather unexpectedly, a voice piped up from beneath the smoky glow of the amber lamps. Liam thought he recognized
it as that of Mr. Wyman, his maritime studies teacher, but couldn’t be sure because Wyman’s voice tended to change depending on the weather.

  “Let him look. None of this is our business anyway.”

  Though visibly displeased, McMahon threw up his hands and went back to scrubbing mildew from the beer taps. “As you like,” he grumbled. “But it won’t be on me. You can explain it to them when it all goes to hell.”

  Wyman—if that was indeed who had spoken from beneath the shelter of his tattered tweed jacket—breathed laughter that sounded like the snow huffing beneath the door. “We’re all headed there anyway, McMahon. Doesn’t matter in what order it takes us.”

  On the wall directly opposite where Liam stood was a cupboard with a missing door, inside which he could see an old dartboard. There were no numbers on the board, only symbols made of wire, symbols he recognized from his schoolbooks and the placard set into the stone block by the church door. The darts were made of boiled leather wrapped around shards of sharpened rat bones. Next to the board was a half rotted oak door that looked as if it had been designed for dwarves, but Liam knew it only appeared that way because time had forced it, like the rest of the building, to sink so that one had to step down into the adjacent room.

  Eager to be free of the atmosphere his presence seemed to have generated among the gathering, Liam hurried to the door, grabbed the metal ring and shoved. Too large for its frame, the door resisted, the wood scraping against the stone lintel, the resultant sound monstrously loud in the confines of the small bar. Even the shadows seemed to shrink away from it. And then he was inside and forcing the door shut behind him.