Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  The cabinet, an old-fashioned wooden sort set deep into the wall, was filled with bottles of medicine. I held up several in the light streaming in from the Indian kitchen. I glanced up sharply when a portion of a diaphanous spangled sari came between me and the light. When it went away again, I read on the prescription labels:

  FOR THE USE OF

  H DORMIN

  or:

  FOR THE USE OF

  J DORMIN

  I examined every bottle in the cabinet. Some of the labels were quite old and faded. Some of the liquids had congealed. Some of the powders had fused. Some of the solids had melted. The chest, as a whole, was such a miscellany and of such an antiquity that I was propelled to the conclusion that the cacophony of bottles was ingenuous. That is to say, by reasonable extension, this was Howard’s house.

  I was, in some vague manner, disappointed.

  I flushed the toilet, unbuttoned my trousers so that I might button them again insou­ciantly, and went out of the bathroom into the long dark hallway. I was suddenly aware of a kind of banging in the house. Howard, I supposed at first, must have gone back upstairs. He was slaughtering rabbits in an attempt to re-interest me in the efficacy of gunware.

  Howard stuck his head out of the door of the room and peered down the hallway at me. I couldn’t make out his expression in the dim light.

  “That’s Grandfather,” said Howard.

  The banging grew louder and somehow more raucous as it slipped out of rhythm with itself.

  Howard came out into the hallway and closed and carefully locked the door of his room behind him. He led me downstairs to the hallway on the second floor. We picked our way by flashlight. The patterned runner on the floor was gnawed by rats. The banging became frenzied.

  “He wants to get out,” said Howard, uneasily shrugging. “The door’s unlocked.”

  We went down to the end of the hallway and paused before a closed door that was like any other in the house but for a large rectangular slot that had been roughly hewn out of the bottom.

  The banging abruptly ceased.

  “The door is open,” said Howard nervously. “Come out.”

  I heard a scrambling inside the room, claws on a bare floor.

  Howard held the flashlight before him and pointed its beam toward the ceiling. On its way there, the light illumined his face and mine.

  “It used to be locked,” Howard explained. “But not any more. Now he doesn’t really want to come out at all. He just likes to pretend that he’s still locked in. Old men are fond of the fucking past.”

  I heard another scurrying within the room. Howard flipped the flashlight over and shone it down toward the rat-gnawn carpet.

  There, thrust out of the hole at the bottom of the door, were two long thin scaled white arms, with gnarled fingers and discolored nails.

  I retreated a step or two.

  The hands and arms trembled, then were still, then in an almost casual way, they mimed the action of someone turning the pages of a book. I thought of a fragile, famous scholar, buried in the bowels of some great library, carefully leafing through an old and valuable volume, with a grace and a surety born of decades of careful scholarship.

  Howard kicked at the scholar’s hands, and they withdrew.

  “Hand me a book,” said Howard contemptuously and pointed behind me.

  I turned around and noticed for the first time a small cabinet of books there. I poked my finger toward it, touched a book, ran my finger up the spine to the top of the sewn signatures, and tilted the book out toward me. I passed it to Howard.

  He briefly shone the light over the spine. Fleetingly I saw the legend:

  . . . OF

  CIVILIZATION

  J. DORMAN

  “One of yours, Grandfather,” said Howard with a sneer, dropped it to the floor, and kicked it through the hewn hole.

  Behind the door, I heard the scrabbling again. I heard the book pushed across the floor. I heard the swish of drapery, and a pale yellow light was then visible within. I conjectured that Howard’s grandfather had opened a curtain, so that he might read by the light from a neighboring building.

  “My grandfather was born on the third of March, seventy-two years ago,” said Howard in an unnatural, stentorian voice. “I was born on the third of March, twenty-two years ago. There is one of us every half century.”

  Howard’s voice echoed in the dark hallway. He switched off the flashlight. When the echoes died down, I heard the turning of the pages of the book inside the room. The dim yellow light eked out of the hole in the door and seeped into the carpet beneath our feet.

  I asked Howard why he had locked his grandfather in this room in the first place.

  When Howard replied, he spoke in the stentorian, unnatural voice, and what he said was like a speech memorized:

  “Grandfather began life as a truck driver, but they caught him running down small animals on purpose.”

  Howard paused; I heard a page turn within.

  “He was a teacher, but they caught him beating all his girl students. He was a writer, but they caught him ripping pages out of library books. He was a postmaster, but they caught him spilling glasses of water into the stamp drawers. He was a police officer, but they caught him pissing against restaurant windows. Now he’s paying for his sins.”

  Howard led me to the other end of the hallway. He leaned against the rotting banister. He looked up into the stairwell; he looked down into it; all was dark. He whispered to me: “I’m afraid of him. I’m taking out a contract on his life. I’m going to have him blown away. I’m going to have his brains torched.”

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?” I asked curiously. “You have a gun,” I pointed out. “You have a knife. You have a canister of kerosene, and I suppose you have a match.”

  “His door is unlocked,” Howard whispered. His fear was genuine. “It hasn’t been locked for years. Before I could squeeze the trigger, he’d tear my arm from its socket. Before I could take the knife out of my pocket, he’d crush my legs. Before I could spill the kero­sene over him, he’d stick his fingers in my sockets and squeeze my eyes till they popped.”

  I lost all respect I’d ever had for Howard. He was craven. It was impossible, I saw now, that Howard was any sort of Messenger at all. He was not controlled by Another. It was doubtful he knew anything about Marta. His slime was putrid: he was not the father of Annie’s brat. Guns and knives and canisters of kerosene cannot make up for a withered scrotum, and I despised Howard Dormin from the bottom of my soul.

  I said to Howard: “It’s time for me to go.”

  “Not yet,” said Howard fearfully. He dragged me back up to his room. I stood outside the door as he unlocked it. I had no intention of going inside again.

  I said: “I’m going down the hall.”

  I went into the bathroom again. From the medicine cabinet I took a large bottle of sleeping pills I had noticed there before. The date on them was recent. I put the bottle in my pocket.

  I went back down the hallway. I glanced into Howard’s room. He stood at the window, his trousers down around his ankles. He pressed himself against the glass. He screamed: “Look at it! Look at it!”

  I went down the stairs. Howard’s grandfather began banging again as I passed the second floor.

  On the first floor, a vague sense of something left undone prevented me from leaving the house. I went into the living room. It was lighted by a streetlamp outside. I maneuvered my way around the furniture and the stacked boxes and approached the carved marble mantel. The gilded French clock ticked there. I peered at its face in the dim light. I struck a match and held it up before the clock. There, painted on the face, was the legend:

  TEMPUS FUGIT

  I placed the clock under my arm and walked out of the house.

  14

  The next thing I knew I was home. I placed the clock on my mantel. Its ticking filled the apartment.

  In every room I heard the quarter-seconds scraping away. I stood in t
he darkened cor­ridors, doors shut at either end, with my hands pressed against my ears, and the beating of the gilded French clock tripped in my coursing blood.

  I went into my bedroom and against all custom, lowered the Venetian blinds. They were the old-fashioned sort, with wooden slats originally painted white, but I had scrubbed them clean so many times that all the paint had worn away, exposing the light-colored wood beneath. I excluded all light from the room.

  I removed my clothes. I put on my blinders, with the white patch over my left eye and the black patch over my right. I burrowed down beneath the covers.

  Behind my blinders, I could not see. No light came to me where I lay curled beneath the sheets, the blankets, and the spread. The room was wholly dark, and I was blinded.

  The noise of the ticking clock at the other end of the apartment filled my brain and beat away there for the whole of the night.

  It is only on Sunday that I sleep late. This particular Sunday I awakened toward noon and remained in bed, in my blinders, beneath the covers, with the blinds in the room drawn, for an hour longer. In the night, a pool of slime had seeped out of my body. It was a frigid pool about my loins.

  I pushed back the covers, I pulled off my blinders. I rose from my sopping bed and raised the blinds.

  The sky lowered. Wisps of cloud were torn apart by the upraised fingers of nearby chimneys and aerials. Drops of rain spattered my hand when I thrust it out.

  I cleansed my body of slime and wrapped myself in a coarse black robe. I went into the living room, where the scraping of the gilded clock was neither louder nor softer than it had been in my bedroom all night long, and I stared for a little while at the bottle of pills I had set at one end of the mantel.

  I emptied the pills into a pressed-glass candy dish, took the bottle into the kitchen, filled it with water to weight it, and then immersed it in a sinkful of steaming water.

  I made coffee. I sat with my coffee at the dining room table, and in my carefullest chirography I penned the following brief note:

  A True Friend

  Respectfully Requests

  That You Partake

  Of the Enclosed

  I returned to the kitchen and took the medicine bottle from the hot water. The gummed label bearing Howard’s name and the direction of the pharmacy that provided the pills slipped off. I washed away the remaining gum and carefully dried the container.

  I took it to the living room and dried it once more. I placed the pills back inside the bottle one by one, counting them as I did so.

  There were NINETY-FOUR.

  The gilded clock ticked away the final moments of Marta’s unhappy life.

  I pitied her. So near her end and her release, and denied the comfort of that knowledge.

  Contrary to my schedule, I arrayed myself in Suit S-4. That deviation was only a detail but it served to mark the importance of the day to me.

  I left my apartment with the bottle of pills in my left hand pocket and the note in my right.

  I walked directly from my building, Number FORTY-SEVEN, to Marta’s, Number NINETY-FOUR.

  I carried my black umbrella against the rain.

  A lesser man might have worried that he did not know which apartment in the building was Marta’s. I had every confidence that I would be shown the way. No such small point of ignorance would interfere with the careful scheme of my grand design.

  My confidence in Fate was not misplaced.

  I mounted the stoop of Number NINETY-FOUR with no idea of how I might gain entrance to the building or, once inside, how I might discover which apartment was Marta’s.

  Just inside the front door of the building was a young man dressed in a dark one-piece uniform, pressing a screwdriver against one of the postal boxes there. As I was taking down my umbrella, he looked up at me through the glass and smiled.

  He was, I assumed, the building’s Maintenance Man.

  He also bore a startling resemblance to Howard Dormin. At first, indeed, I thought it was Howard, with the addition of a false moustache.

  Further, I was almost certain that the moustache was false, for it appeared to have come unglued on the left side of his mouth, but then I saw that it simply did not exist there.

  No one seeking to disguise himself, I reflected with relief, would employ but half a moustache.

  The Maintenance Man of Number NINETY-FOUR was not Howard Dormin, therefore, and after a small hesitation, I returned his smile.

  He stood up and opened the door for me. He motioned to me to come inside out of the rain.

  “Are you the police?” he asked.

  It was polite conversation. By no stretch of any diseased imagination do I resemble an officer of the law.

  “Why do you ask?” I asked.

  “Thought you might be wanting to ask questions about Mrs. Hodges.”

  I detected in his voice an uncanny resemblance to Howard’s.

  “Why would I want to do that?” I asked.

  “She died in her bathtub. Her mother thinks it was murder,” shrugged the Maintenance Man. “Maybe it was. I wasn’t there.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t know anything about Mrs. Hodges. I came to leave something off for a friend of mine, but I don’t know which apartment she lives in.”

  “I can help you,” said the Maintenance Man with a friendly smile. “Unless your friend was Mrs. Hodges. She’s dead. Unless you’re bringing flowers, of course.”

  “No,” I said, “not Mrs. Hodges. A young woman called Marta. She’s a waitress at the Baltyk Kitchen down at the end of this street. Do you know who I mean?”

  I wanted, at all costs, to avoid having to provide a physical description. With my grand scheme so near to completion, I wasn’t certain that I was up to that. And my aversion, though perfectly understandable, might yet suggest that my errand was sinister.

  “Yes,” said the Maintenance Man. “Number ONE-EIGHT. Next to Mrs. Hodges. It was Marta who found Mrs. Hodges.”

  I didn’t know what I should do then. I was confident this friendly Maintenance Man would let me into the building, but I did not want to chance Marta’s hearing me outside her door, opening it, seeing me there, questioning me regarding the pills I had left her, and so on and so on, till the whole tight perfection of the plan wound down in a welter of words and explanations.

  “You’re not her first guest,” said the Maintenance Man in a low, insinuating tone.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said.

  “Marta has lots of friends,” said the Maintenance Man with a leering smile that might have been peeled right off Howard Dormin’s face. “I’ve been in Marta’s apartment lots of times.”

  “Oh yes?” I murmured, sickening at the very thought.

  The Maintenance Man grinned. He had been polite to me at first, the way any good employee is polite to a guest of the establishment that employs him. But once I had mentioned Marta, his attitude had changed. We were comrades in his warped mind. He had taken a tone of repellant familiarity with me. “I was there last night,” he grinned. “Fixing her leaky faucet. Unclogging her sink. Stopping her drip. Checking her plugs.”

  Despite the negative evidence of the half-moustache, I was very nearly convinced that it was Howard Dormin who stood leering before me.

  “Marta the Waitress?” I asked, unable to excise the incredulity from my voice.

  The Maintenance Man, who might or might not have been Howard Dormin got up in disguise, nodded with a knowing, conspiratorial smile.

  “Number ONE-EIGHT,” he repeated. He pushed open the inside door. “Go on inside. Knock loud just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” I asked.

  “Just in case she’s entertaining again, that’s all.”

  The hallway of Marta’s building was carpeted in a lozenge pattern, each white lozenge containing a black rose on a curved stem. The wallpaper was the negative image of this: a white rose on a curved stem set inside a black lozenge. I mounted the carpeted stairs.

  Marta’s fl
at was on the third floor, at the front. I took the note from my pocket and placed it on the floor underneath the door, with a corner of it protruding inside her flat. I placed the bottle of pills atop this.

  For some time I stood silent and unmoving before that door, transfixed by the knowledge that she dwelled within. Marta—I told myself, and scarcely believing it, as an exorcist even as he pronounces anathema is never convinced of the reality of the devils that puff out the belly of the possessed boy—is behind there. Her essence danced in the air that swirled through the keyhole.

  I knelt and peered through, but for my trouble saw nothing but an expanse of bare painted floor.

  I knocked loudly and rapidly three times and then fled down the stairs. I slowed only on the last flight. I did not wish to appear conspicuous.

  When I reached the first floor, the Maintenance Man was gone. That was just as well. I was relieved not to have to explain to him why I had not stayed.

  I put my hand to the knob of the door. I heard his voice behind me.

  “She’s in,” he said. “I know she’s in.”

  I turned around. The Maintenance Man stood in the shadows at the end of the hallway. He stepped forward toward me.

  “I just wanted to leave her a little gift. A little surprise,” I said. “So don’t tell her who—”

  I broke off in disgust.

  The Maintenance Man had come forward into the light.

  He had unzipped his uniform and the top half of it now fell about his waist. The arms of the uniform swung with a graceful languor as he moved.

  The left side of his chest had hair, the same color as his partial moustaches. The right side was smooth but bore a fair-sized, fair-shaped female breast, with a large soft nipple spitting out from the center of it.

  “If she’s busy up there, come down to the cellar,” he suggested. “Marta’s all right,” he said with lascivious deprecation, “but I’ve got variety . . .”

  I turned and fled from the hermaphroditic abomination. So much deformity beneath one roof I thought, and was grateful I had seen no one else who lived in the building. On my reeling way out, I pressed the button for Number ONE-EIGHT. That was my only farewell to Marta. She was, I told myself, as good as dead.