Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  No, no, no! hisses the voice in his ear.

  He looks down. He nearly stepped into the black circle, which is no longer burning, no longer glowing. And he shudders. He doesn’t know why, but he knows he should never step in the circle. Never cross its edge.

  The screams in the fog have gone silent. He feels no desire to know who it was, whose voice shrieked from the fog, no more than he feels desire to know why that fog never moves, why the sky never clears.

  Go to your family. Love them. Let them love you.

  And he goes back to the garden, not a trouble on his mind. Before the light starts to fade, he’s filled a big wooden basket full of fresh-picked ears of corn. He’ll shuck them so Lynda can slice off the kernels and can them. They like to do this together, let their smiles do all the speaking. They’ll do it tomorrow. He so looks forward to it.

  * * *

  But things in the house take a turn for the worse. His heart won’t settle. His mind won’t stay quiet.

  Dinner goes wonderfully enough, built around two thick steaks he set out to thaw early that morning. He even speaks to Meaghan for a little while once the rich meal lulls her mom into an evening doze. While Lynda slumps comatose at her end of the sofa he settles comfortably at the other end and listens to his daughter’s high, sweet voice sing the alphabet, or mouth nonsense syllables to the same calliope tune, and he feels consciousness drifting off.

  An electric hum accompanies a constant, steady rattling. It takes him a moment to place what he’s hearing: the rapid-fire click-click-click of a home movie projector. Delmar hasn’t heard that noise since his twelfth birthday, when his father dug out that seemingly ancient machine to show the gathering of school chums embarrassing footage of the family dog wrapping her leash around a younger Delmar’s stumpy legs.

  It’s now Delmar’s father who sits with him, hunched at the other end of the couch. His father’s head turns on a neck mutated by swelling cancer lumps. You asked me to dig out this one , his father says, the sound coming through the surgery hole in his throat. Don’t whine to me. This is all your cross to bear.

  The beam from the heard-but-not-seen projector shines on a wall of fog that conceals the other side of the room. Distorted on the fog, Meaghan’s face flickers in close-up, framed by straight dark hair just like her mother’s. The footage is black and white, rendering her bright green eyes a moist gray. He recognizes her unicorn pajamas.

  A large hairy arm, a man’s arm, reaches into frame, takes her wrist. Her eyes bug, her face contorts. Delmar feels the prickling inside as the huge hand turns her wrist palm up, as another hand, the right to match the left, stabs a butcher blade into her forearm, slices a long black line.

  All this has unfolded free of all sound save the rattling projector, but when Meaghan’s mouth stretches open to scream it’s loud and piercing and absolutely real.

  Delmar starts awake. Lynda is beside him on the couch, still comatose. Meaghan screams again, somewhere in the house. Lynda doesn’t stir.

  Delmar can’t bring himself to move, paralyzed by a gut-dragging-and-twisting spin of disorientation. He can’t remember a time when he’s heard Meaghan’s voice without Lynda close by, and he knows something is wrong with that, really wrong, and the voice that protects him is saying that too, that something’s wrong, he can’t really be hearing that. Yet upstairs—she has to be upstairs —she cries again, “Dadd-eeeeeeee!“

  The noise as raw and loaded with pain as if she’s fallen on a bed of nails.

  He runs for the stairs pell-mell. His daughter screams again, the sound like pins stabbed into his eardrums. When he reaches her bedroom door, her shrieks hardly sound human.

  But he throws the door open, and she isn’t there. There’s nothing there. The room is empty, even of furniture.

  Meaghan shrieks again. Now, the noise comes from downstairs.

  The voice in his ear is whispering, It’s gotten out of control. You need the book. You need to get it now.

  Delmar doesn’t understand what the voice wants. Or something in him doesn’t want to understand.

  At Meaghan’s next howl, he plunges back down the stairs. But stops halfway.

  On the couch, in Lynda’s place, a monster writhes, a black sunburst of ropy worms. The shrieks he hears are coming from somewhere in its center. It lurches to the floor, dozens of snaky limbs flopping blind, turning over lamps and end tables, capsizing the tv.

  The book , hisses the voice in his ear. This time, he understands, and knows he has to obey.

  He dashes through the den, toward the hall and the utility room at its end, but one of the black ropes twines his ankles, and then the thing is pulling itself on top of him, wailing in Meaghan’s voice. Keening syllables that are almost words.

  His bare hands tear at the cables of black flesh sliding against his skin, but it’s as if two tendrils replace each one he breaks, lashing around his forearms and thighs and belly, struggling to hold him still. The thing is still screaming, now with Lynda’s voice. A snake-smooth band of contracting muscle coils around his neck, starts to tighten.

  But he is stronger. He shoves to his knees, rips out the boneless limbs by their roots, hurls the thrashing tangle across the room.

  Lynda screams, screams, screams.

  He returns from the utility room with a huge book, its leather binding on the verge of crumbling, its pages flopping as he holds it open. The symbols in dark brown ink mean nothing to him, though they radiate a head-spinning wrongness. If these scribblings form words, he doesn’t know what they say—and yet he does. It’s as if another person inside him uses his eyes to see, his mouth to speak, knows the precise rhythms and pauses. And as this happens the squealing black thing in the den begins to foam, to buck, to lengthen and thicken and lighten in hue. Delmar’s vision blurs, with tears that he understands no more than he does the incantation.

  His voice rises in crescendo, and all the space around him seems to ripple, in a way that can’t be seen physically—yet his mind still senses it. The ripple starts where he’s standing and spreads through the room, the house, even the land beyond, and he knows that the power in that subtle wave is setting things to right. The voice tells him so.

  The black thing is gone. There’s only Lynda, resting peaceful on the couch, her only motion the soft rise and fall of her breath. There is no sign of Meaghan, but the voice is telling him not to worry about that. He might not see her, yet whenever he asks, she’ll speak, and he’ll know she still loves him.

  Lynda’s limp as a bag of straw, but he’s strong enough to lift her. He carries her to bed.

  * * *

  Using the book always makes him uneasy—vaguely, he recalls he’s had to before—but now all is restored. Outside, there are no stars, but neither is there darkness. Just as with the sunlight, an unseen moon bathes his farmland in its shine. He can make out the shapes of the horses, straight-legged and still, possibly sleeping.

  He snuggles in beside his lovely, witchy wife, no troubles on his mind, and settles his head in the pillows.

  He’s back on the sofa, and behind him the projector rattles. Meaghan sits next to him, kicking her legs, which don’t quite touch the hardwood floor. I asked grandpa to get this out again, she says. We haven’t watched it since forever.

  The film unspools in grainy black and white, just like before. But now it resembles hidden camera footage, the view angled down from a corner of the ceiling. From this vantage the disembodied observer peers into a large room with cinder block walls, its carpet and other objects, mostly large plastic toys—a playhouse, a hobby horse, a Sit ‘N Spin—shoved hastily against the far wall to bare the cement floor. Three figures huddle at the center of the bare floor, a man, a woman, a girl maybe seven years old. And the man has a book, a huge ominous tome. There is a small window in the far wall, placed high, indicating a basement room. The window is just out of the camera’s range of clear focus. Beyond it, through dingy glass, shadows move with chaotic fury. Sometimes blinding light flares th
ere. Sometimes the window goes completely dark.

  The man is drawing frantically on the ground. The film speeds, somehow recorded in time lapse, an effect that drastically accelerates the chaos seen in silhouette through the high window. The man completes a huge circle inscribed along its entire circumference with headache-inducing sigils. The circle encloses him and the woman and child.

  “You were always so good at drawing when you worked at that school,” Meaghan says beside him.

  “University,” he corrects out of reflex.

  She giggles. “I remember how you came home all the time with those weird drawings in your coloring book.”

  “Sketchpad, darling. It was a sketchpad.”

  “How you said you got ’em from some book you were studying and you never let me look at ’em. Never.”

  He turns to tell her to stop sounding mad, it was all for her own good, but she’s gone. Yet he’s not alone: he’s looking at a copy of himself, but with bruises on his face, a cut down one cheek, dressed in an Oxford shirt with a deeply stained collar, a torn sweater vest, fancy slacks ruined by more flowing stains. He looks like an academic who just escaped from the mouth of Hell. He’s dressed just like the man in the movie. He is the man in the movie.

  I try to stop you from remembering , this new self says, but you fight me. Some part of you is always warring with me, trying to remember everything. And when you do, you’ll understand why you have to forget again. Understanding means madness. The man’s voice, the voice of this other self, is the voice he always hears whispering in times of terrible stress.

  His guardian self keeps talking, but Delmar stops listening, because a new voice distracts him, murmuring right in his ear. It’s Meaghan again; he can practically feel her lips against his skin. “Don’t listen, Daddy. He can’t stop you from knowing.”

  Delmar watches himself in the film, scrambling to draw a second, smaller circle, about the size of a manhole, at the center of the larger one. It’s an agonizing, slow process, taking time even in time lapse, with the activity seen in shadow at the far window getting more and more frenzied, impossible to comprehend. Oftentimes the mother, who his mind admits is Lynda, must be Lynda, seems like she’s having an exasperating time keeping the little girl inside the circle.

  As Delmar watches, his immediate surroundings fade. Soon’s there’s nothing left but the picture show flickering on the fog and Meaghan’s voice in his ear.

  “Sweet Daddy. Don’t you worry ’cause I still love you. I understand it all. You tried to use evil to do a good, good thing, but you had to be evil to use evil. But you did it ’cause you love us and love can be evil and good together.”

  The time lapse reverts to normal speed. In black and white, Delmar and Lynda are arguing. She turns hysterical, terrified as his gestures grow more frantic. In the background, unnoticed by either of them, the little window rattles. Darkens. Bizarrely, it looks like hair is growing around the frame.

  The voice changes oh-so-subtly, still with the timbre of a child, but more adult, more knowing. “What you did was so powerful it could never work, never, without the blood of an innocent. I know, Daddy, I know.”

  In the film he screams, the contortion of his face grotesque in total silence, and his wife pushes his daughter toward him. He takes her wrist, produces the knife. Still unnoticed, the window pushes open, just a crack, and the hair-tendrils that have worked their way into the room begin to thicken and lengthen into streams, into ropes. Something huge is oozing through the gap around the glass, pouring down the wall as if made from soft clay.

  “I should have been smarter, Daddy. I shouldn’t have been so scared.”

  The image goes out of focus, becomes a crazy split screen, left and right visions going out of sync. In one lobe, Delmar, weeping as he chants, holds his daughter’s bleeding arm over the inner circle, its black designs coming to life, shining, burning as the blood strikes it. In the other lobe, the window pane bows and shatters as a slimy mass of dense hairy jelly shoves its way through, unfurls in an explosion of sucking lamprey mouths and clusters of lidless human eyes.

  Staring down from the corner again as the insanely hideous thing lands on the debris and springs—and it is as if the creature strikes a wall where the outer circle is drawn, as if it crashes straight into curved aquarium glass. The creature is not repelled by the barrier, but hangs there in the air, sticking to the invisible wall like a tarantula hugged against a fishbowl, its dozens of limbs splayed out radially from its squirming core, like a spider escaped from a deranged hallucination.

  Delmar has released his daughter’s arm. He’s kneeling by the circle, the book beside him, cords standing out against his neck as he chants. And the little girl sees the horrid thing hanging in the air. And she screams. And she runs. Away from the center of the circle. She runs out of view of the disembodied ceiling observer, and the thing crawls so fast around and across the surface of the invisible barrier, scuttling spider-fast, as Lynda lurches too late to catch her daughter.

  All through this, Meaghan’s whisper has never stopped.

  “Don’t you want to know really why we love you so? Because you’re just like us, just one of us, all part of us and us part of you. We ate you all up, we did. You made the spell work, you made the monster back into mommy and me with that magic from my blood, but we’re still it and it’s still in you, it’s always been in you, changing you inside, one slow cell at a time, because your spell can’t protect you that small.”

  The dream camera coldly documents what follows. The burst of dark fluid that sprays into the circle. A woman’s severed arm lands on the floor, a foot lands another place, snakelike black limbs greedily snatch them up, gulp them down. The man’s face a mask of horror, but he doesn’t stop his chant, even as the multi-limbed thing joins him within the invisible aquarium, squeezing in through the opening made when the outer circle was fatally crossed. The dream-Delmar doesn’t stop his chant, even when the creature sends long hooked limbs around the burning inner circle to hook into his vulnerable belly, punch in and drag out the gray ropes coiled inside. The man’s face contorts in unspeakable agony and mystic ecstasy as he howls his final syllables. And it’s at that moment that the inner circle surges in a pillar of blinding fire, and the film changes to color, Wizard of Oz technicolor.

  “But Daddy, the part of us inside you is going to wake up. And then we’ll be together like we should be and you’ll never be alone again. You’ll never, ever, ever be left alone. When you hear my voice, I’m saying other words too, words that you can’t hear, but the sleeping part of me that’s inside you can. It hears me and it wants to wake up. And when it does, that voice you always hear won’t really be yours. It’ll be ours. And we’ll trick you, and you’ll ruin the spell. We’ll trick you, Daddy, when we wake up.”

  The burning circle, now a blackened spot in a beautiful pasture. And the man, his body whole, his clothes changed to suit his surroundings, picks himself up as he watches a black mass shrink and thicken and transform into a new, familiar shape. But only one shape. Never two.

  And behind them, at the edge of the pasture, the fog. And above them, the grey clouds that will never, ever lift.

  A tickling at his ear, a whisper.

  “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

  He springs awake and gropes for the lamp. The bulb casts its light across the comfortable contours of his bedroom.

  His wife lies on her side, sleeping peacefully, her back to him, the cartoon cat on her favorite nightshirt flashing its inane grin.

  From under her collar a dark tendril stretches, no thicker than a strand of yarn. Its end rests on his pillow, bulging out into a plush-lipped mouth that nestles beside the indentation where his head had rested. It continues to mouth words as if it doesn’t know he’s not there anymore.

  Delmar trembles, staring at the tiny mutant mouth that murmurs in his daughter’s voice. His eyes bulge. Tears smear his cheeks. All the barriers he’s built inside his own mind to survive day to day
in this world he created for his family, for what remains of them, have crumbled. He comprehends everything.

  He only ever hears Meaghan’s voice when it speaks from Lynda’s body. Confronting this truth isn’t what causes him such disgust and dismay. What rips deep inside him, aggravates once again that pricking beneath his skin: never before has that voice turned against him, said things that Meaghan herself would never have said.

  He leaves the bedroom, comes back with the book. Sets it down. Sits on the edge of the bed beside Lynda, sets to work with a blow torch and knife. His tears never stop.

  He returns to the book, starts to read aloud.

  * * *

  It’s dark beneath the ever-present clouds, but he knows the way. He walks across the verdant pastures that always stay green and thick with grass no matter how long the animals graze. He walks past the burnt circle, its ember glow patterns pulsating brighter than he’s ever seen, a silent blare of strident warning. He leaves the circle behind, strides into the fog, consumed by the message he needs to deliver.