by Ed Kurtz
“Misssster Blackmore is sick. Very sick. He comessss back next week.”
And with that, the sibilant voice was rendered silent by the click of the disconnecting line.
Walt’s phone, and his phone book, were then returned to their hiding places, the only evidence of their use the claret smudges staining both.
34
Three days after Amanda’s ankle was broken, the infection became apparent. The entire joint swelled to bursting. It went from red to bronze, and from bronze it turned a sickly black-green. Enormous blisters speckled the area from the middle of her foot to the center of her shin, which reeked of putrescence when they broke and started to leak.
There were dreams, nightmares, though too fragmented to make any sense of them. Nothing worse than the life she now led, such as it was, and eventually indistinguishable from her waking hours. Everything was foggy, indistinct. Painful.
Was this the cost of love? she wondered, vaguely. Was there love without trust? Was there love when the hate felt stronger?
One chose love, she’d once concluded, long before Walt. No one helplessly fell—the helplessness came later. Amanda chose wrong, and now her helplessness was acute, her destiny complete. Had she selected a monster in a charming mask to love, or had the monster only gradually come to replace that man? Her memories were too slippery, her recall failing. She tried in vain to search her brain for evidence, red flags she’d missed, as though it could make any difference now. Weird little flashes of anger, shifts in mood, dark omens portending this atrocious outcome. Perhaps, she thought, that monster was in every man, just waiting to be properly germinated before springing to life, overtaking him and everything around him. No amount of kind gestures, heart-melting smiles, or soft touches could counter something like that.
Christ, she thought before slipping into a black-out sleep, even Hitler loved dogs.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, she dry-heaved for hours. Not long after sunset, she collapsed into a coma.
Sarah remained awake throughout the night, weeping loudly and calling Amanda’s name. Screaming it.
By dawn on the fifth day after the injury, Amanda was dead.
Sarah decided it must have been gangrene. Walt had not done a thing about it. He had not come up into the attic at all since Sarah woke up there. But she could hear him down below. Talking to it.
She made up her mind then and there. If Walt did not kill his sister first, she was going to kill him.
WINTER
ALICE
1923
Dragging the frantic child up the ladder that goes to Papa’s attic is no simple feat for Agnes. The girl spits and shrieks like a cat, pumps her legs and throws blind punches behind her. None of them find home. Agnes is much too strong.
She climbs the rungs with one hand and pulls the girl by the hair with the other. The child thinks her scalp will tear away from her skull as though she was being mutilated by some Indian warrior.
But it holds all the way up. All the way up to Papa’s half-finished attic.
Open air and fresh cut pine beams, rusty old tools Papa got second-hand from the five and dime scattered here and there. The roof is a yawning maw of incomplete crosshatched boards and though the waning dawn moon can see every indignity and every atrocity, it does nothing but gape and gawp.
Agnes hurls the child over an upended sawhorse. She lands hard on her hip and cries out in pain, cries out with puzzled horror, why Agnes why? Her older sister’s eyes glint in the fading moonlight; glowing silver they seem to reflect her innermost badness, the core of her being that the girl never knew was there.
Papa was mine, Agnes shrieks, he was mine and you took him away. Mine, mine, mine.
35
When Walt was fourteen years old, his father and stepmother’s house burned to the ground. He was aware of that piece of history now as he roamed its inexplicably pristine rooms fifteen years later, but somehow it seemed insignificant to him. The house was never quite home to him, but there were hundreds of memories here all the same. The bookshelves in the study that reached to the ceiling. The fireplace in the master bedroom with an extra opening in the master bath. The kidney-shaped swimming pool out back and the naughty games Walt had played in it with Cheryl Atkinson when his folks were away on vacation. There were probably a hundred things he could seek out as he floated from room to room, slowly remembering, but for some reason all he wanted to do was find his old bowling ball.
Sure enough, the oily smelling leather bag was right where he’d left it the last time Walt was in the house, on the top shelf of his upstairs bedroom. He was a hell of a bowler in those days, top of the youth league and better than most adults he ever played against. He took excellent care of that ball and recalled how, of all the things he’d lost in the blaze, it was that ball he most regretted losing. But here it was now, just above him on that high shelf. He reached up and pulled the heavy blue bag down. The shelf was not as high as he remembered it. Of course, he was taller now.
Setting the bowling bag on the unmade bed, Walt trembled with anticipation. It was just a bowling ball, in no way particularly superior to any other ball he’d ever used, but it was this one with which he’d won so many tournaments. It was this one that had miraculously been returned to him. Or was it the other way around? Perhaps it was he who had been returned to the ball. To the house. It didn’t matter. He licked his lips and unzipped the bag. The metal teeth spread apart and he dropped both hands into the musky darkness inside. His fingers pressed hard against the firm surface of the ball. He hefted it up and out of the bag.
And then he yelled with fright and revulsion. He was not holding a bowling ball at all, but rather the gray, severed head of his own father.
He let go of the head and let it fall back into the bag. It thumped against the bottom. Walt shivered and quickly backed away from it, scrabbling backwards to the closet. His momentum was halted when his back hit the slatted closet door. The door slammed into the shelf. A half dozen more decapitated heads rolled off the shelf, raining terror down on him. He screamed. Then he realized he was awake.
The dream lingered in his mind as if trying to break out of his brain and into reality. He recognized the difference between nightmares and the waking world, but he found himself worrying about what he was going to do with all those damn heads nonetheless.
There are no heads, stupid, he chastised himself. Get up and shake it off.
He did. Flinging the sheets back, he sat up on the edge of the bed and forced his eyes wide open. He sucked the cool night air in through his nose and then blew it out of his mouth. The heads began to dissolve along with his sleepiness.
He stood up, stretched, and fumbled around in the dark bedroom in search of a shirt. The floor yielded only underwear and socks. The top of the dresser was clear of all clothing save for his sweatpants, which he snatched and stepped into. Carefully, Walt searched the bed. He found no shirt. He didn’t find Gwyn, either. She must have gotten up at some point in the night.
He wrinkled his nose and felt his heart flutter. This seemed like something worth worrying about.
***
Dudley Chapel tossed and turned. The blame for his sleeplessness laid mostly on his aching back, but his knees and right hip shared the culpability. He’d taken four ibuprofen before bed, but Dudley snapped awake just three hours later with pain biting into his back and side. The older he got, the more everything hurt. He tried to be philosophical about it, but it was now almost two in the morning and he did not much feel like counting his blessings. He just wanted the pain to stop, if only for a little while.
Rose breathed slowly and softly beside him, fast asleep. Unlike Dudley, Rose suffered no such problems in her muscles and joints. She was ten years his junior, and though no spring chicken, she was as fit as a fiddle. He envied her for that, but he also thanked God that his wife of thirty-six years was still so healthy and spry. The way things were going, he expected to be six feet underground before her body began to
fail her. It was selfish to be thankful for that, and he knew it, but seeing Rose go to pot just wasn’t something he thought he could make it through. Dudley loved her too much for that.
After rolling over for the umpteenth time that night, he finally resolved to just get out of bed. Sleep was going to be elusive, and he was in no mood to chase it. He had half a pitcher of lemonade in the icebox and a recent adventure novel on the table beside his favorite chair downstairs. He figured if he fell asleep while reading, then great. Otherwise, he aimed to read until sunrise and then take the day as it came. Life could be worse.
So Dudley poured himself a lemonade, dunked three ice cubes in the glass and settled into his chair for the long haul.
He was halfway through a riveting sequence in which the American spy is discovered and cornered by KGB henchmen in Soviet-controlled Prague when he heard glass burst and clink apart somewhere inside the house. He dropped the paperback on the table without bothering to bookmark his page and stared, hunching his shoulders and wondering what had happened.
“Rose?”
Dudley exhaled an exasperated breath. The last thing he wanted to do was to get out of his comfortable chair, but he didn’t suppose the shattered glass was going to investigate itself. With a frustrated grunt, he heaved himself up and felt the stab of pain in his back as he stood.
“Cripes,” he groaned. Then, “Rosie? Is that you, sweetheart?”
Heavy breathing sounded from one of the darkened rooms ahead of him, and shuffling movements, the creak of the floor.
“Rose, honey?”
The sneaking sounds moved across the hall and onto the staircase. Whoever it was— whatever it was—it was heading upstairs.
***
Walt made a sweep of the house, growing increasingly desperate to find Gwyn before something terrible happened. What that meant, he wasn’t at all sure. But where Gwyn was involved, terrible things were bound to happen.
He searched the house from the bedrooms to the kitchen cupboard, checked the carport and the front and back yards. She was nowhere to be found. With mounting anxiety, he returned to the hallway between the kitchen and his bedroom.
“Goddamnit,” he grunted as he yanked the attic stairs down. The attic was the last logical place to look. And that could not mean anything remotely good.
The ladder clacked loudly to the floor and he scurried up its steps, his flashlight tightly gripped in one hand. As soon as he poked his head up into the dark, suffocating space, he shone the light in slow sweeps across the area. He saw Sarah asleep on the old mattress he’d laboriously dragged up there for her. She was, for the most part, unharmed. The revolting flaps of tissue where Gwyn’s pod once grew continued to rot in the far corner, the raw stink of them overwhelming. There was no sign of Gwyn herself.
She was nowhere in the house. She had simply up and left in the middle of the night while he slept.
There was only one conceivable reason Gwyn would have to leave.
Blood.
Walt had to find her.
***
Increasingly convinced that a prowler had broken into the house, Dudley crept as quickly and quietly as he could toward the staircase. He’d listened as the intruder made his way up them and now he was giving chase. With each too-slow step he took up the stairs, he tried to figure out how he was going to get to the revolver in the drawer beside the bed without being noticed. By the time he made the landing at the top, he decided it wasn’t possible. He was just going to have to confront the son of a gun barehanded and hope to heaven the prowler was not armed himself.
As Dudley pressed himself against the wall and got ready to sneak up on the potential killer, his mind involuntarily flashed back to Mindanao. Cruising downriver in the landing craft with a hundred other guys, waiting with his heart in his throat to charge out of the craft like they did in Normandy. The melting heat and constant rain having taken its toll. He remembered hoping he could take out at least ten Japs before he died that day.
He didn’t die, of course. And although he found his brain dancing over the same steps now as it had back then, he had no intention of dying tonight, either. He crept on, closing in on the bedroom at the end of the long, dark hallway. Then he heard the whine of compressed bedsprings and a low, throaty laugh.
His chest felt tight and his heart leapt, just like that muggy day in the Philippines a lifetime ago.
“Rosie,” he whispered.
He came into the pitch-black room, and as he felt along the wall for the light switch, Rose Chapel screamed.
***
His muscles reflexively jerking and contracting, Walt traversed the backyard, his path lit only by the pale hue of the moon. He had no destination in mind because he had no clue where she might have gone. His new house was in the boonies, the middle of nowhere, and on the outskirts of a nowhere town. There were no shops or housing developments anywhere near the place, no apartment complexes or million-dollar prefab mansions. In fact, there was practically no evidence of human civilization for miles around except for that old guy’s farmhouse. Walt struggled to recall his name—Danny? Dabney?
Dudley. That was it: Dudley Chapel. The irritatingly friendly old man in the red flannel shirt.
Through them woods, over the hill, he’d said. Right at the bottom, that’s my property. Big red house with white shutters. Can’t miss it.
“Christ,” Walt said.
He broke into a run for the tree line. Still, somewhere inside he knew he was already too late.
***
Dudley flipped the switch with a shaky thumb and choked on the scream rising in his throat. The bedroom had been transformed into a grisly abattoir. What had been white bed sheets and a pastel quilt now dripped crimson wherever he looked. This was no longer his marital bedroom. It was a slaughterhouse.
A terrifying apparition straddled Rose. Like the butchered woman under her, the creature was spattered with blood from top to bottom. All that shone through the gore was its pearly white teeth, straight but overlong, exposed in a rigid, spine-chilling grin. Its right hand was curled tightly around a long shard of broken glass. The shard tapered down to a point at the end. As the creature turned its ghastly smile to Dudley, it jammed the makeshift weapon into Rose’s cheek.
Dudley cried out with pain and horror as he watched the jagged glass fragment sink into his dead wife’s face, scraping noisily over her teeth before exiting through the other cheek. The creature then gave the shard a sharp yank and it ripped through the flesh, meeting the ends of Rose’s mouth. Now it all formed a single gaping gash from one jawbone to the next. Blood gurgled up, flooding her mouth and spilling out on the bed. The creature cackled with mad glee.
Tears squirted from Dudley’s eyes as he stumbled forward. His attention leapt between the creature and Rose, the creature and the drawer beside the bed. That inconceivable thing, that devil from Hell, had killed his darling Rose. If he could only reach his revolver in time, he could at least make the monster pay for what it had done.
He sped around the corner of the bed and lunged for the brass handle hanging from the face of the drawer. Before he could reach it, the creature swung a wayward fist in a wide arc, connecting it with Dudley’s temple. A bright flash exploded in his eyes, and warm, dull pain spread across his entire skull in a second. He dropped to his knees and heard them crack loudly. The creature smirked.
“Fuck off, old man,” it hissed at him. “You must wait your turn. First, I eat this one. Then, I eat you.”
With that, the thing sank one of its shiny red hands into Rose’s bloody torso and pulled out a dripping handful of the corpse’s small intestine. It was gray but leaking black, and the horror on the bed made certain to look Dudley in the eyes as it stuffed the guts into its open mouth. It bit down with a sated moan and tore the intestines apart with its hands and teeth.
Dudley moaned, too. He felt his gorge rising but he did nothing to prevent the bilious spray when it erupted out of him like a geyser. The creature merely laughe
d at his despair as it opened Rose’s neck with the glass shard. Her throat came apart like wrapping paper. The thing squealed happily and plunged its face into the freshly cut wound. It lapped up the running, spurting blood like a kid at a water fountain.
Dudley tried to cry out, to vocally demand God explain how this could happen, but the gloom was already creeping in from the corners of his vision. He was blacking out, but he invited it. It was better to be inert when it came. His final thought before the darkness took him was a kind of farewell.
Goodbye, Rosie. I’ll see you very soon.
***
Walt cursed at the second tree trunk he slammed into, but he didn’t slow his pace. He had never actually been to the old man’s house, much less seen it. Finding it in the dead of night was not the easiest task and time was running out, if indeed it hadn’t already. He sped on, dodging trunks and naked branches as best he could until finally he emerged from the woods. He sucked the cold air in through his nose and peered out over the low, grassy hill before him.
Right at the bottom of the hill. He raced up it.
From the summit, he could make out the shadowed edges of a three-story farmhouse below. Dudley Chapel’s house. A single square of yellowish-white glowed on the third story.
“Let me be wrong,” he whispered to himself between heaving breaths. “Please God, let me be wrong about this.”
He pumped his legs and fanned out his arms for balance as he scrambled down the hill and toward the house. A small pen came into view beside it; three or four hogs lay huddled in a muddy pile. In front of the house, an ancient Chevy pickup was parked, all rounded corners and rusted green paint. Dudley must have been driving that heap for decades. Old folks were always so resistant to change.
I’ll bet they’ve never seen anything like Gwyn. That’s got to be new to them.
