by Joe Sullivan
Her fingernails were black and purple with painless bruising.
#
She lay in the other bed, Den’s, nearest the bathroom, and shook with cold and sweat. Her left hand held Den’s car keys. It was night, deeper than night with the comforter over her head, but she still heard the faint scratching sound coming from the door. Her phone was gone, somewhere. She’d only looked for a few cursory minutes earlier, after she had found the keys. Had there been splinters of it in the sink along with his? Her head ached. There had been a dial tone on the room phone, but she remembered only replacing the receiver after some unknown web of time.
She lowered the comforter to her neck and exposed her face to the room. The door was cracked open again. She sat up and hugged her knees. Her hand reached out and switched on the lamp’s bitter cone of light. There was only the same wedge of space, but a moment later she saw an eye watching her, a figure standing too high some feet back from the cleft of the door. Only the one eye, wide and difficult to make sense of from a distance, the way the figure seemed to be hunched down to peer through the top of the door.
She staggered across to the door and slammed it shut, tackled it, twisted the deadbolt. Then slid down its length and curled on the floor, her nightgown puddling around her. She told herself she was foolish, sleeping there like a dog waiting for its master to come home.
#
Late in the morning she scrubbed her dying hands and feet. The bruised nails tore off and skin started to come away with the washcloth. Blood swirled into the bathtub drain. She had slept, her body barring the door, and dreamed segments of earthworms and arrangements of orchids. All she knew of the hours since dawn was lying prostrate before the plate-sized hole in the wall, her head wedged between the wall and the toilet.
For some reason the door leading outside was open again, and far away was the sound of a big truck’s air brakes out in the parking lot. Karen pushed her face inside the hole, breathing in a hint of that musk from the ruin behind the motel. The dark between the walls shifted, or somehow dilated. She was trying to detect her husband in the scent and in the space. There was a hum, and after a long while she heard it as the beating and sawing of many wings, distant for now, an atonal thing that might have always been there, waiting for Den or someone else to kick a hole into its container. It passed the time to imagine carpets of droning bees crawling over one another in an unimaginable honeycomb, chewing pulp since before this motel was thrown together on top of it. She tasted flavors in the air that brought images of cold stars and marrow inside of bones, all beneath the tang of musk. When she pulled her face away from the hole, she saw a single veined insect wing on the linoleum.
She made her way to the mirror, leaned over the sink, and with her small pair of sewing scissors made a half-inch cut across her cheekbone. Two of her fingers crept between her lips and probed. Florida was still pinned to her mind, but it was more sediment than destination. It was losing its context. Blood beaded below her eye. She couldn’t remember her last moment of clear thought.
She saw her mouth and the tooth, a canine, between her fingertips. She saw herself. Capillaries had burst in her eyes, staining them pink. “Louisville,” she said around her fingers. She threw the scissors into the sink and went into the other room, hefted her suitcase onto a bed. It was still mostly unpacked.
#
“We’re from Louisville, Kentucky,” she practiced. The cheap dresser with its television was pushed up against the door. “I am Karen Alma Tumey. I was born on September thirtieth, nineteen sixty-six, in Cleveland, Ohio.” She revolved in the room, stuck her head into the bathroom to check the hole in the wall. She had plugged it with the contents of her suitcase, like a gag. Her new swimsuit was its soft brown tongue, the store tags still attached. “My maiden name was Nowak. I met Dennis at a Shoney’s in Parma in nineteen eighty-seven, which was funny because just down the road was a Denny’s and he said he usually had his late-night munchies there because he felt more at home with his name all around him.” She sat down on one of the beds then instantly hopped back up. Her words found a momentum. “I was twenty-one and Den was only my second kiss and we got married at my mother’s Methodist church in October of nineteen eighty-nine, the trees had almost finished turning, and losing my virginity hurt very much because he’s got such a big cock—” Her stomach clenched and knotted with hysterical giggles, like a run of piano keys, and she thought about food for the first time in she didn’t know how long. “There’s a granola bar right over there in the backpack,” she told the room. “I can’t have children. I haven’t worked since I was nineteen. I used to have seizures. I still can. I just had one, don’t forget. I remember myself and I don’t care what’s in this place. I want to find my husband and go away from here. He is all I’ve got.” She went through the alphabet in a faltering singsong until she began to cry.
She checked the curtains and the door and the hole.
#
She kept waiting for Den, and the world—at least the motel room—was cocooned. It time-lapsed. She slept and dreamed of slick fingers groping at her. What little food she had stayed down when she ate it. Morning came, the furniture pushed up against the door. Eleven small holes dotted the northern wall of the room. A chalk-dusted nail lay just inside the bathroom, so she supposed she must have made these holes. Cold crept out of each of them, and closer now, the violin drone of insects. The soft meat of her fingertips and toes was hardening where the nails had been.
She chewed stick after stick of gum and filled Post-It notes with squinted jostling letters, perhaps addressed to those who might come to room 116 of the 40 Winks Comfort Lodge after her time. On the notes she called her hometown Clland and Clevlin, Hlis and Cmfort. She addressed her husband as Lld and Dsrh and something else that was entirely illegible. In a moment of her reverie that felt like breaking clouds she wrote, I have no need for my nebhor, then frowned at the pen. She wrote: In the bathroom there is a hole there is a clump of albino bees. Their honey and meat. And These gods must be so heavy. On another she scrawled BRIDGE. And others, the entire pad of Post-Its, worms and stars and bees. The hole in the bathroom was still clogged with her clothes, and she pressed balls of chewing gum into every hole above the beds, until each would take no more. Then she recited her life again.
#
“Louisville, Kentucky,” she said when she got behind the wheel of Den’s VW. “Shoney’s in Parma.” She stuck the key in the ignition. “Nineteen eighty-seven. But I existed for a long time before him, you know. All the way back to nineteen sixty-six. In Cleveland. I was Karen before I was Den’s.” Her hand was on the key. Her fingers squeezed it as they had briefly squeezed her tooth inside the room. But she couldn’t leave him, not even to go to the police. She couldn’t.
#
The motel office was locked with a CLOSED sign hanging in the door. She peered into its dimness, putting off the inevitable, then went around behind the motel. Passing the back corner, this time she felt a sort of membrane in the air, lighter than a cobweb, like pushing a finger through a child’s soap bubble. There was the same quiet as before, as in the ruins of old temples, the relics of trash with forgotten logos fossilizing. Something had once been here before anything, she had no idea what, and something was still here, in its way. It was such an ordinary ugliness, this scene, a couple of steps further gone than most seedy motels across the litter of America, but it felt unfathomably old here. There was deep memory.
The curtains of the six windows slept. The same air, heavy and wet with musk, but lacking any intent. From the slope of the bank the stunted trees leaned toward her, and the sentinels at the top stood in the same thin poses. Karen stood open and expectant, feeling the quiet—feeling the atoms inside the quiet.
She became aware of time passing and shook herself into motion. Den’s new room had to be beyond one of these six doors, and she did not want to touch any of them. She murmured her litanies, her Louisville and Parma, things that weren’t on the Post-It notes.
She was not quite conscious of walking to the first door, but her hand extended, and her withered fingers wrapped around the doorknob, ordinary metal, cool and warm. She twisted. Locked. The curtains might have never been opened since the day they were hung, so unbroken was the line where they met along the bisection of the eye.
The second knob turned in her hand, and with a steeling breath she pushed. Something pushed back. She let go as if burned and heard the deadbolt snap. The eye of the window clenched shut, as though hands had pressed the curtains together.
The third door was locked, and she didn’t linger. As she stepped to the next, she saw the fifth door farther along, a black stripe between the blue door and its frame. She felt four eyes on her but there was only the blanket of humidity on her skin. She walked, almost crept, the dozen feet. Pushed and the door swayed open.
The sun spilled inside around her, but she froze in the doorway. A cloud of copper stench met her, thick enough she nearly had to look through it. Den kneeled on both knees in the middle of the room. He was naked. His face was misshapen, full of bumps and irregular curves. He held a pair of pliers in his mouth and bent his attention—“Nnnnnnn”—on extracting a tooth. It came away with a grunt, held between the pliers’ jaws under Den’s smiling, somehow artful scrutiny. It glistened with bloody drool.
His mouth hung open, and splendor was clear on his face as blood dribbled to his chin over the dried blood that had come before it. She could see one tooth in the cave of his mouth, but the rest was craters. His right eye was filled with blood. Random chunks of his hair had been hacked off, and lacerated scalp was exposed in bald patches.
She looked from one horror to the next, each less than an inch apart. The changes seemed to outnumber the features she knew. The shape of what might have been part of a finger bone pushed out from his right cheek, a white tip protruding from a slit next to his earlobe. The shape of a large toenail was pouched beneath the skin between his eyebrows. And there were many other cuts, other insertions—teeth, mostly, too many to only be his own, peeking from their new pockets, damp wads of hair tucked into his neck, creeping out of crescents under his nipples. Her eyelashes were in him somewhere, she realized, and her throat filled with acid. She tried—there was nothing else she could hope to do—to look away so as not to see Den slide the fresh tooth into a waiting hole in his chin. Two fingers—wounded and diminished where the nails had been torn off—clamped the chin while the other hand—his tongue lolling—
And on the floor a pile of things: still more teeth, steel nails and fingernails, a mound of hair, dull-looking knives streaked with gore. Bones in a tumble, bird, cat, dog, human, bones. There were no furnishings in the room and the walls were entirely bare. No mad slashing messages written in shit or blood. Just walls, stained by disregard and all the time that had passed back here in this world. The carpet had long fouled, turning slowly into some other material.
She looked back at her husband, spelled his name out in her mind. Her chest hitched and Den seemed to notice her then. He made a garbled cough, and staring at her with calm, he said, “Oo on’t haff a tay hell, hon.” His lips pulled back in a smile, and no evil lurked within it.
He shifted, turning on his knees, and she saw the skin from calf to heel had split open, or been split open. She saw bone. Strips of muscle caught the light as he knelt in a small marsh of himself.
At last she sobbed and tried to move toward him, a foot farther inside the threshold. It was the look in his eyes that stopped her. It wasn’t remorse or affection or a plea for help. It was a coherent gaze. There was a clean sanity. It infected her with more sense of herself and their marriage than she’d had in days. He was soaked in pride. He was in thrall.
Karen backed out of the room, into the hammer of the sun. Den was rising to his feet, following, still grinning his empty hole at her. She was half-turned away, in a slow pivot, when she saw that a man—something that had the shape of a man—blocked her way.
There was the impression of candles partly melted, wax and bone and a thin stretch of flesh. Close to eight feet tall, it—he, there was an elongated dead penis hanging between the legs, free of adornment—looked down at her with eyes that were each four inches wide and reaching around the sides of its head. Black eyes with hard yellow-blue pebbles. Its head looked like something with petals reaching toward different suns. The face had long ago erupted with protrusions, bone and tissue relocated until time softened their shapes.
And teeth everywhere but in his mouth, which opened more on subdermal tusks than jaws. Fistfuls of teeth buried in mounds and rings and ranges beneath the skin. Shoulders and neck, torso, downward to the legs, full of grafted bone, like a skeleton digging its slow way out of its prison. Or a living geology. She wondered what it would be like to squeeze the overflowing arm and feel the teeth and other fragments shifting and grinding—or would it be rigid and fused? Like a postscript, what felt like hours after she had first turned to see it, she saw that its hands were obscene, ridged and humped. The fingers had their own fingers.
And then another figure appeared at his side. Younger—clearly younger, clearly less of this thing—with augmentations that still bore puckered scar tissue, not long healed. The shape of its head was still human. Karen guessed it was female. What might have been breasts once sagged loosely below the newer shape of bones and teeth that formed rings on the chest. It was an infant dwarfed by the other. She could almost hear the sockets of its eyes creaking open, the rubbing of the orbital bones around a bright brown. Ridges of teeth formed inscrutable patterns along the cheeks and forehead.
Den was trying to become like this.
Karen was studied. The cut she had made across her cheekbone began to burn, and she looked away over the shoulders of the gods.
At the top of the clay bank, along the row of short pines, silhouettes stood, as tall as the trees. A pink sun sank into their backs—dusk falling here, already—and swallowed their distorted figures.
She counted three of them, or four, and turned back to the motel. The musk was in her nose, the dusk tinted everything red, and she felt a peace, a throbbing of calm. These had once been guests of the motel, like her husband, but she was somewhere else, a place of gods. The place inside the walls.
Den stepped before her on his torn legs. In one hand, the pliers clicked. With his other he pointed at the keys she had forgotten were in her hand. “Don’t haff to tay hell, hon.”
She smiled at him, and the warmth of just smiling loosened everything inside her. It was a false smile, it was for him alone, but it helped. “I won’t, Den,” she told him. The other two, the new god and the older, stayed where they were, but she heard movement coming down the bank.
The membrane dropped fully away. The falling sun deepened its red then, and there was a gathering of the air, a slow sound of bees and a slower sound like a distant mountain stepping over a river. Den gazed up, tightening the strange additions to his neck against the skin of his throat. His eyes filled with rapture. From above a shadow draped her. It fell across the entirety of the motel and told her the older god was in fact very young. She could not begin, now, to articulate this new shape’s lines and many limbs, assemble a structure for it in her mind. Useless lest she turn to see, far above her small heart of a face, a citadel of bone.
And still farther, the first strange stars.
END
Michael Wehunt grew up in North Georgia, close enough to the Appalachians to feel them but not quite easily see them. There were woods and woodsmoke and warmth. He did not make it far when he left, falling sixty miles south to the lost city of Atlanta, where he lives today, with fewer woods but still many trees. He writes. He reads. Robert Aickman fidgets next to Flannery O'Connor on his favorite bookshelf.
His short fiction has appeared in various places, such as The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year's Best Weird Fiction, Cemetery Dance, The Dark, and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu. His debut collection, Greener Pastures, shortlisted for the Crawford Award a
nd a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, is available from Apex Publications. He is at work on his first novel, with a second collection of stories on the way. Visit him at www.michaelwehunt.com.
Fly away, little fledgling.
Michelle Garza & Melissa Lason
The coughing was nonstop, rasping and wet. The girl couldn’t sleep for the noise, but she guessed she would soon be getting enough sleep and resigned herself to lying awake. She stared up at the ceiling for a while, counting the minutes and wondering when might be her last.
#
Tranquil Halls Hospice Center was in a large complex but only occupied one two-story building, the rest was left empty. It was old and tucked away on the outskirts of town. Abbie thought it held a charm but at times it felt so separated from the real world. The stairwell leading to the second floor always creaked and moaned. Abbie often held her breath when climbing them and wondered how in the hell the building even passed inspection. She'd worked there only six months, but it already felt as if an eternity had gone by.
People come here to die, why would anyone care if the stairs were safe or not?
It took a special kind of person to give end-of-life care, and when she began her career, she really thought she had what it took, but when Charlotte's bed was being prepared for her, Abbie just wanted to run and never look back. She never got used to caring for children who were terminally ill, it felt so unnatural to watch their little bodies withering away. It sent her mind to a dark place.
