The Mouth of the Dark

by Tim Waggoner

  The ground units had fenced-in patios, while the upper units had wooden decks with a set of stairs leading down. The patios had slabs of concrete – weathered, cracked, and broken – along with a small strip of ground between them and the fence. Jayce assumed there was supposed to be grass on the ground, like a tiny lawn, but the earth was bare and wet. Fat earthworms writhed in the soil, reminding him too much of cankerworms. He didn’t want to think about that zoo trip now, maybe not ever again, so he looked away from the worms and continued on. The fences were falling apart, slats missing, the wood so old it was peeling away in threads. The decks of the upper units were in seriously poor condition, and their flooring sagged. Jayce couldn’t imagine that those boards could support the weight of anything larger than a sparrow.

  The building seemed even more rundown and ramshackle than he remembered. Was this another case of his ‘Eye’ seeing what had been there all along, or had it really gotten that much worse since his last visit?

  Emory’s patio had no furniture, not even a lone plastic chair that she could sit on when the weather was nice. She’d planted no flowers in the small patch of ground, nor were any decorations visible through the small kitchen window. There were no personal touches of any kind outside, not a single thing to show that Emory – or anyone else, for that matter – lived here. The patio’s anonymity made Jayce suddenly doubt himself, and for a moment, he feared he’d come to the wrong building. How could he tell for sure that this unit was hers? He thought it was, but given the lack of distinguishing details.… Then he noticed a large gouge in the planks that made up the small gate built into the fence. It was large and deep, slanted from right to left, and cut across several boards. He’d noted it when he’d visited on Emory’s birthday, and she’d taken him onto the patio so they could talk while she smoked. Jayce didn’t approve of her smoking, wasn’t even sure when she’d picked up the habit. He didn’t smoke, and neither did Mackenzie. Even though he hadn’t said anything, she’d sensed how he felt and they’d ended up arguing, and she’d gone back inside her apartment, slamming the patio door so hard he’d been surprised the glass hadn’t shattered. Feeling it would be wiser if he didn’t go back inside, he’d opened the patio gate and left using the rear walkway. He’d noticed the gouge in the wood during his departure, and he’d wondered what could’ve made it. Had someone used a knife? Had some sort of animal done it? Ohio had coyotes. There hadn’t been any in the state when Jayce had been growing up, but they’d gradually moved into the area during the last couple decades. The damned things were perpetually hungry, and they seemed to have little fear of humans, scrounging outside their houses – or apartments – in search of any scraps of food that might satisfy, however temporarily, the yawning pit at the core of their being. The gouge looked too wide and deep to be coyote work, but whatever had made it, it told him that he was in the right place.

  An image passed through his mind then – a gray-skinned hand, fingers terminating in sharp black talons, an index finger extended, the nail being drawn across the fence, making a single deep groove, curled wood shavings falling to the ground.… The image passed as quickly as it had come, but it left him uneasy.

  He opened the patio gate, the wood feeling moist and soft beneath his fingers, the creaking of its hinges sounding loud as a gunshot to his ears. So far, he hadn’t seen any of the building’s occupants, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Plus, people would be getting home from work soon, and he didn’t want to be caught prowling around the building. He left the gate open to avoid making any more noise, and then he walked to the patio door. He tried to open it and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. Breaking the glass wasn’t an option. Not only would it make far more noise than a squeaky gate, it would be the kind of noise that prompted people to call the police.

  And you’d probably end up slicing your hand to ribbons and bleeding to death before you could get help, Mother said.

  “True enough.”

  He stepped up to the patio door and tried to look inside, but not only was the glass dirty, the vertical blinds were pulled closed. Emory had once told him that the latch on her patio door didn’t lock tight, and if you pulled on it hard enough, the lock would disengage and the door would slide open. He’d told her to get an old broom handle and cut off a length of it that she could insert in the door’s track to prevent anyone from opening it. She’d told him she would, but in a way that indicated she’d said so only to make him feel better. He’d have made a rod for her, but he’d known she’d only resent him for it, so he hadn’t. He gripped the door handle and pulled, putting his weight into it. The door resisted at first, but then it gave way with a soft snick and slid open. The door’s motion caused the blinds to swing and make soft clacking sounds as they bumped into each other. Jayce pushed the slats aside and stepped through.

  The air in the apartment was stale and musty, as if the place had been closed for a long time. There were no lights on, so the room was dim, but he could see well enough. Emory’s furnishings were minimal – chair, couch, small wall-mounted TV, a table with two mismatched chairs – everything except the television purchased at secondhand stores. Same for the artwork, a framed print of geese on a winter lake and another of wild horses galloping across an open plain. Emory liked to keep her space neat, always had ever since she was a child, and there were no signs of untidiness. No shoes in the middle of the floor, no clothes draped over the back of the chair or couch. She’d inherited this quality from him. She certainly hadn’t gotten it from her mother, who believed that cleaning was something you paid other people to do for you.

  He knew Emory wasn’t here. He could feel the apartment’s emptiness. But he still called out for her, just in case.

  “Emory? Are you here? It’s Dad. I’ve just come to check and make sure you’re all right.”

  Silence.

  Despite knowing he’d receive no answer, he couldn’t help feeling disappointed. He’d much rather have his daughter come storming out of her bedroom yelling at him for breaking into her apartment like a crazy man than be confronted by the quiet reality of her absence.

  “Where are you, sweetie?” he said softly. There was no reply, of course, not even from the part of him that spoke in his mother’s voice.

  He began making his way through the apartment, searching, but for what, he didn’t know. Something, anything, that might give him some indication of what had happened to Emory. There was nothing in the living room, so he moved on to the kitchen. The counters were clean, save for a small stack of mail. He looked through it but found nothing of interest, just bills and junk mail. The sink was empty, but the dishwasher was full of clean dishes. If she’d planned on going away for some time, would she have left the dishwasher full like this? Many people – maybe most – would have, but Emory bordered on being OCD when it came to neatness. He had a hard time imagining her leaving her apartment for any length of time without putting the dishes away. He checked the cupboards next, more to be thorough than because he expected to find anything important there. There were a lot of easy-to-make boxed meals, various kinds of rice, canned soups.… The shelves were far from full, and he wondered if she ate out a lot. The thought saddened him. When she’d been a child, he’d known her eating preferences and habits as well as he did his own. But looking into her partially stocked cupboards made him realize once more just how little he really knew about the woman Emory had become.

  He shut the final cupboard door and turned to the refrigerator. Would he find it even emptier than the cupboards? If Emory hadn’t been back here for a while – which seemed to be the case – there was bound to be spoiled food inside. Sour milk, rotting meat, unidentifiable substances green with mold.… What good would it do to look at that?

  It would give you some idea how long she’s been gone, he told himself, although there might have been a bit of his mother’s voice in there as well. If the milk was fresh, that would mean she had been here recently. If i
t was well on its way to becoming cheese, it would tell a different story. So he opened the fridge.

  It was far from empty, but it didn’t contain plastic jugs of milk, liters of soda, bottles of ketchup or mustard, half-full bottles of wine, or plastic storage containers with leftovers inside. Instead, the shelves were lined with clay jars, the kind sold at CrazyQwik. Nicola had purchased one last night, but he hadn’t thought to ask her about it – or what was really in it – during lunch. Seeing these jars.… He tried to remember what the dog-eater Zach had called them last night. Was it…vessels? That sounded right. Seeing these vessels in Emory’s refrigerator struck him two different ways. It was a validation that, despite what that fucker working the counter last night – Virgil – had said, Emory did work at CrazyQwik. Or at the very least, she shopped at the place. But on the other hand, the sight of all those vessels – there must have been close to thirty of them – was more than a little disturbing. There wasn’t anything else in the refrigerator, just the jars. They varied somewhat in size and shape, and they had symbols on the front that Jayce didn’t recognize but which hurt his eyes to look at.

  He hesitated, and then he reached in, chose a jar at random, and lifted it out to examine. He left the refrigerator door open and cool air slowly surrounded him as he gazed at the vessel. The markings consisted of a series of curving and interlocking lines that refused to make sense, no matter how hard he stared at them. The jar felt cold in his hand, far colder than could be accounted for by being in the refrigerator. So cold, in fact, that it was more than a little uncomfortable to hold. He brought the jar close to his face and inhaled through his nostrils. The smell of hardened clay was strongest, but there were other scents as well, subtler ones. He couldn’t put a name to them, but they summoned images in his mind. One was of a snow-covered landscape at night, illuminated by the sickly glow of a swollen pus-yellow moon. Hundreds, thousands of skeletal arms jutted upward from the snow, as if reaching toward the moon. Another image was of a large slime-coated sea creature with a mottled grayish-white hide, tusked and spiked, thousands of tiny crab-like creatures clinging to its body, working industriously to strip the flesh from its bones as it swam through a night-dark sea. There were other, even stranger images, but these were the only ones he could make even partial sense of.

  He moved the vessel away from his face, and the images ceased. He was trembling so violently in the aftermath of these visions that he almost dropped the jar, but fear of what might emerge from it should it plunge to the floor and shatter helped him maintain his grip. If it had given him visions that strong when it was closed, what the hell would happen to him if its contents were released?

  What the hell was in there? Some kind of drug? If so, it had to be goddamned powerful to make him hallucinate like that. But if it was a drug, how could CrazyQwik get away with selling it out in the open, stored in one of their coolers, no less? Hand still trembling, he put the jar back in the refrigerator. Whatever the jars were, based on the different markings on their surfaces, no two were the same. He thought about examining another, but instead he closed the refrigerator door. One was more than enough.

  He reluctantly checked the freezer and was relieved to find it contained only a few low-calorie microwaveable meals. He left the kitchen then, walked through the living room, and down a short hallway. The apartment’s layout was almost identical to his, and this thought depressed him, although he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he was in his fifties and living no better than his twenty-year-old daughter. Or maybe it was because she wasn’t living any better than her failure of a father. The apartment’s sole bathroom was located in the hall, and he stopped to check it out. There was makeup on the sink counter – mascara, eyeliner, lipstick – along with some haircare products. He found body wash, shampoo, and conditioner in the shower. A quick search of the sink cabinet drawers revealed nothing of interest. After what he’d found in the refrigerator, he was reluctant to open the medicine chest, but he did. He found several unlabeled prescription bottles. There was no way to tell what the pills inside them were, and he put the bottles back, closed the medicine chest, and left.

  There was a linen closet next to the bathroom, but all he found there were towels, washcloths, and an extra set of sheets. He was starting to feel like an idiot. What the hell had he expected to find by searching Emory’s apartment? A diary that contained all of her deepest, darkest secrets? A calendar or datebook with appointments written down, detailing her daily schedule? Or better yet, a note saying where she’d gone, why she’d gone, and when she’d be back?

  A few more steps and he was at her bedroom door. It was closed, and he stood there for a moment, debating whether he should enter, if he could bring himself to violate Emory’s privacy to this extent.

  You’ve already broken into her apartment, he thought. You might as well go all the way.

  He opened the door and stepped inside.

  He’d never been inside her bedroom before, and being here made him feel more like an intruder than at any point since he’d forced open the patio door. Even when Emory had been little, he hadn’t gone into her bedroom often, mostly at nighttime to read her a story, tuck her into bed, and give her a goodnight kiss on her forehead. She’d stopped wanting stories – and kisses – by the time she reached middle school, and he and Mackenzie had divorced not long after that. Emory had kept him at arm’s length ever since, so the sudden intimacy of being in her most private of places made him uncomfortable. It reminded him of how much she was a stranger to him, and vice versa. The bedroom was a far more intimate place to him than the bathroom. He viewed bathrooms as utilitarian places for eliminating waste, for cleansing and grooming one’s body. But this was where she slept, where she dressed, where she brought lovers to or, if she was alone, where she pleasured herself.

  Her bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the rest of her place. A single bed, a lone nightstand, a small dresser. No artwork on the walls here, no photos, either. The bed wasn’t made, the sheet and comforter pulled back as if Emory had just gotten up. As neat as she was, he was surprised she’d left the bed unmade. Maybe she’d been late for work that day. Maybe she’d been late for something else. Whatever the reason, it seemed she’d left in a hurry.

  The air inside her bedroom held a strange tang that reminded him of a pet shop. Sawdust bedding, ammonia, and the musty-acrid odor of mingled animal scents. But underlying this was the rank smell of sex – sour semen and vaginal musk. His stomach roiled as a sudden wave of nausea hit him. He wasn’t one of those fathers who freaked out at the thought of his daughter as a sexual being. He wanted her to have a happy, healthy life, and sex was a natural part of that. But this smell – this stink – was like a room in a whorehouse, or maybe a hotel room where a porno had been filming all day. It was a smell of raw animal lust, mindless and meaningless.

  He tried to think of the smell dispassionately. It meant that Emory had been here recently, maybe as recently as the last few hours. Except that didn’t feel right. The smell was strong, yes, but it felt old, as if whatever had taken place in here had happened a while ago and the stained sheets hadn’t been removed from the bed and washed. But that didn’t explain why the stink was so goddamned strong. He couldn’t imagine only two people being responsible for this smell. Had Emory brought a small army of men into her bedroom and they’d all stood round the bed, jerking off and squirting semen all over her? As soon as the image came to him, he regretted it, and for the first time since he’d started searching for his daughter, he wondered if he should stop. By continuing to look for her, he might discover things that he’d be happier not knowing. He thought of the dog-eaters and the man with the green gloves at the Thai restaurant. He’d already encountered some goddamned disturbing things while looking for Emory, and he had a bad feeling it was only going to get worse from this point forward. And the things he’d encountered had started to stir up memories that he’d buried – the man with the gray skin, the canke
rworms devouring the giraffe.… If he kept going, what else might get dredged up from his subconscious? Were there even worse memories hidden there? He feared there were, and if he was forced to remember them, could he handle it?

  For his own sake, he should leave the bedroom, shut the door, and get the hell out of Emory’s apartment. He shouldn’t be here anyway. He was violating her privacy, not to mention breaking the law. Mackenzie was probably right. Emory was most likely fine and he was just letting his imagination run away with him, as it often did when it came to the possibility of something bad happening, thanks to his mother, who’d instilled in him a deep paranoia and distrust of the world and everything in it. He should go home, try to rest, get a decent night’s sleep, head on in to work tomorrow, and wait patiently for Emory to get in touch with him or Mackenzie. And as for Nicola.… He didn’t really know her, did he? And just because she’d helped him out in the alley last night didn’t mean her motives for being willing to continue helping him were entirely altruistic. She knew about the dog-eaters and hadn’t seen anything especially odd about the man in the green rubber gloves. Whatever sort of bizarre world those weird people inhabited, Nicola was a part of it somehow, and for that reason, if no other, she couldn’t be trusted. This was his last chance to walk away. If he continued now, there would be no turning back, for better or – more likely – worse.

  He almost did it. But he thought of the little girl at the zoo, the one clinging to him and pressing her face against his chest so she wouldn’t have to look at something that was bad – really bad. He had been there for her on that day, and he wouldn’t turn his back on her now.

  He stepped into the bedroom.

  He started with her dresser and found it held only neatly folded clothes. The closet was the same – blouses, slacks, and dresses hanging up, shoes arranged in a row on the floor. Nothing else. He moved to the nightstand next, fearing he’d discover items of a more personal nature there. But when he slid the drawer open, all he found were bottles of hand lotion, headache pills, decongestants, and a book bound in black leather. At first he thought it was a Bible, which he found odd as neither he nor Mackenzie was religious. They’d never discouraged Emory from learning about religion, but she’d never displayed any particular interest. People changed, though, and if she had taken up a religion, it might explain her apparent disappearance. Maybe she was so caught up in the newness of it all – the people, the services, the Bible study – that she’d been neglecting her secular life. And since he and Mackenzie didn’t subscribe to any religion, maybe she was reluctant to tell them about her new passion in life. Jayce wasn’t certain how he’d respond to Emory if she’d found God – especially if, like a lot of new converts, she was overzealous or worse, fanatical. But he’d find a way to accept whatever she was into, as long as it meant she was safe. He pulled the book out of the drawer and examined it. The title was embossed on the cover in gold foil letters, as he’d anticipated, but it wasn’t written in English. He thought it might be Latin.