Beneath The Surface

by Simon Strantzas

  Finally, her fingers burst through flesh, milky white gore spilling over them, and the struggling creature’s folds closed as it ceased to fight. Behind her, a terrible wail filled the room, and she saw Stanley clutch his head with both hands as though flooded. His eyes rolled white and as he gasped his face became a rictus of pain. Then, with the slightest of noises, he crumbled lifeless to the floor.

  He lay there in a fetal ball, eyes wide and blank, milky liquid bubbling from his mouth and nose across the hardwood floor of his bedroom. Leslie dropped to her knees, running her sticky hands across his face and through his hair, sobbing and kissing his cooling skin.

  When her tears eventually faded and dried, hours later, she pulled a sheet from the bed still rich with Stanley’s sweat and laid it on the floor. Into its center she placed what was left of the furry mess and wrapped it over and over again in the bedding. Wiping her swollen face, she lay down quietly on the floor beside Stanley, pressing the swaddle tightly to her bosom, and wrapped his long dead arms around her.

  She then went to sleep.

  OFF THE HOOK

  THE LIBRARY WAS empty. There were none of the elderly that usually littered the place, hovering between racks, ignorantly reading books they couldn’t be sure they hadn't read before. Raymond displayed his irritation with them as openly as possible. The less they liked him, the more alone they would leave him. If they needed to talk, let them talk to Jocelyn. At least then they would be doing him a favor.

  She came in just after ten, small hat matching her shiny purple slicker, and looked around at the emptiness.

  "This place is like a book museum."

  Raymond grumbled.

  "I bet the rain's driving everyone away," she said, hanging up her dripping coat. "That, or the garbage strike." A series of wet footprints trailed behind her on the jaundiced carpet.

  The rain fell in sheets; solid curtains that obscured the landscape. He could see flashes of business suits and skirts as they blurred past the library’s window, weaving between the uncollected trash on the corner. By the time they made it to the concrete steps that led down to the subway they were soaked through. Raymond snorted at the thought as he worked in the quiet fluorescence, shelving and re-cataloguing the returns from the previous week while rain continuing to scratch the walls.

  The shelves were horribly disorganized. Every week he'd go through them, marveling at how careless people were. Books from one half of the library wound up on the other, pushed into places where they had no business, where they didn't belong. From the floor, he could see the corner of a notebook projecting from the highest shelf as if it had been carelessly hidden. He needed the stepladder to retrieve it, and even then it required a stretch. The notebook itself was unremarkable, a faded blue cover lined with creases, its pages yellowed and curled with an indecipherable scrawl. It looked old, as though it had been in with the collection for years, but surely Raymond would have come across it before. More likely it belonged to one of the infrequent students in the midst of a paper.

  As he inspected it for a name, he heard a bell, like the bell of the front door opening. He leaned the book in the middle of the bookshelf, directly under the spot where he'd found it, and stepped out from between the stacks. There was no one there. He must have imagined the sound. Across the empty library shadows rippled, cast by the pool collecting in the skylight well. The path from the entrance had yet to fully dry.

  • • •

  The wet fingers of the late autumn night crept through Raymond’s clothes and skin, wrapping tightly around his spine. His fists were like two stones, thrust into his pockets to shield themselves from the pour. Shoes soaked, he could feel foul water seeping between his toes with every step. In his shivering mind’s eye, Raymond saw his umbrella, warm and safe and dry, beside the door of his apartment.

  The bus had been packed with people, sullen soggy faces cast downward in emptied stares. They pressed up against him, their cold humidity fogging the windows, and their smell sickened him. The garbage strike was only three days old, but already the stench had soaked into all those around him. Everyone carried the odor of putrefaction.

  Eyes watched from the broken windows and shadowed doorways of Regent Park. He could feel them sizing him up, tracking him as he walked the rest of the way home. Awkwardly, he hurried between piles of plastic garbage bags strewn across the sidewalk, one hand on the bulge of his wallet, ready to break into a run. In his periphery, flickers of movement followed him from the edges of the wet street, like lions in the long grasses, but the rain helped keep the animals at bay.

  It was no park at all. As it stood, Regent Park was really a maze of dirty alleys and graffitied buildings only two blocks wide. It had stood for only five years, but built so cheaply it looked worn by fifty, and the wet air carried the reek of kitchen grease, boiled eggs, and urine. In the summer it was probably unbearable. Another route home was out of the question; like the sanitation union, the bus union was also striking, and service had been cut on all non-essential routes. After six, Raymond was forced to walk the remaining five blocks home through Regent Park.

  Beneath the barrage of rain he heard ringing. It warbled as though from a telephone made of thin plastic and tin. The sound echoed through the buildings, reflecting off grimy walls and stones, making it impossible for Raymond to pinpoint. He suspected at first it came from one of the dim windows that clogged the streets and dismissed it. But the sound did not stop. The bell continued to drill all the way through Regent Park, and even after he had escaped and returned to his own tiny apartment, the distorted notes were still stuck in his mind. He turned up the television volume and managed to find an uneasy sleep.

  • • •

  The deluge of rain continued to keep patrons away. Raymond sat behind the library counter in the morning, trying to concentrate on a crossword puzzle with the ringing in his head, when Jocelyn floated in half an hour late.

  "Sorry. Alex and I lost track of things."

  She said little else. He felt as if she were testing him, trying to goad him into a response. Perhaps she planned to report it to the Director McGuann, finally giving him a reason to ask Raymond to leave. Raymond was on to her, however. He said nothing.

  The first half hour of her shift was spent hovering near him, adjusting the terminals, filling out forms, trying her best to make him uncomfortable. Her perfume, like some sickly sweet flower, clung to his nose even after she left the room, a phantom of herself remaining behind. It still wasn’t enough to mask the foulness that, like all the rest, she carried.

  Her boyfriend, Alex, arrived an hour before closing, clad in a wet leather jacket and a pair of pre-faded denim pants. He waited for Jocelyn to change, thumbing the paperbacks pulled indiscriminately from the rack.

  "Where is everybody?" the boy asked, his eyes on the volume in his hand rather than the person he addressed.

  "The rain," Raymond said, teeth grit. "The rain keeps them out."

  "The streets are the same. Everybody stays home in weather like this; even the homeless are holed up somewhere. I only spotted one on my way here, staggering through the rain like it wasn't there. Probably going to catch pneumonia."

  Raymond grunted, hoping that was the end of their conversation. A moment later Alex went back to browsing, and Raymond resisted the urge to monitor his movements surreptitiously. When the boyfriend tired of investigating the new additions, he disappeared into the stacks, a trail of wet footprints following him.

  "Alex, we should — Where's Alex?" Jocelyn asked, emerging a few minutes later. Raymond pointed the way with a roll of his eyes.

  "Alex! We should go."

  Her boyfriend mumbled something that Raymond missed over the noise. After a moment, Alex appeared, a familiar blue notebook in his hand. Raymond wished he had thought to hide it better.

  "Hey, can I take this?"

  "What is it?"

  "Just some notebook. I can't figure out what it's about."

  Jocelyn looked at Raymo
nd, as if waiting for him to say something. He pretended not to hear them.

  "It belongs to somebody."

  "You can bring it back tomorrow."

  "Oh can I?" She sighed. "All right. We're late as it is. But I am bringing it back tomorrow. I don't want to get in trouble." She looked over her shoulder at Raymond. No doubt she'd blame its disappearance on him somehow.

  Once they had gone, the quiet of the empty library only brought attention back to the ringing in his head. The white noise could be an effect of the rain pelting the building, but relocating to different sections of the library changed nothing; the drilling remained, just in the background of his thoughts.

  • • •

  At six o’clock the telephone at the front desk rang, overlapping the noise in his head. Raymond had already locked the doors and turned off the last of the lights, looking forward to getting home and sequestering himself away from the world so he could relax. He hesitated, watching the tiny light of the outside line flash, before answering.

  "Hello?"

  Static crackled down the line in rhythm with the rain upon the window. Behind it, he could just make out a garbled voice trying to break through. It took a moment, but the distortion dulled enough that Raymond could tease random words and phrases. Their meaning, however, remained unclear.

  "...scrambled all the pages to my chest and ran...all around...I could...buzzing of thousands...dizzied...scent of death...see the skulls...lurk...everyone I passed..."

  "Hello?" Raymond repeated. "Who are you calling?" The sound of his voice echoing back through the receiver was tinny, returning from far away. The rain pounding against the window made it difficult to hear the speaker.

  The voice continued, oblivious: "...everywhere...row after row of the dead...marching ignorantly...sheaves of paper slipped...could not stop to retrieve..."

  "Can you hear me?" Raymond stressed the enunciation of each word. Behind him, the knocking became sharper, slow and rhythmic, and he was startled by the shape of a man at the window, face twisted and distorted by the rain streaming off the glass. "We’re closed," Raymond waved, receiver cupped to his chest. "Come back tomorrow after nine." The man did not seem to hear him over the sound of the storm. He continued to bang against the glass with the flat of his hand.

  "I have to go. Tell me who this is or —"

  "...to the old man’s office..." it continued. "...had to disguise...were to discover the knowledge we...shudder..."

  Irritated, Raymond hung up the telephone. When he looked back at the window the man had gone.

  • • •

  Raymond was getting off the bus at the foot of Regent Park when the ringing became louder. He shook his head, tried to clean his ears, but it was no use; the sound remained. The rest of the world seemed dampened by it. He felt the pounding of rain on his umbrella but could barely hear it. Everything else was silent.

  At the stop stood a shelter, its clear plastic walls a canvas for magic-marker slogans, in which the shadow of a man waited, his features erased by the rain. He took a step toward where the bus and Raymond were waiting and stopped. Raymond hurried off.

  The apartment felt miles away, its distance lengthened by desperation. Raymond saw movements everywhere — on the streets, behind windows — but never enough that he could follow. Deafened by the ringing and blinded by the rain, he almost tripped over a huddle of youths perched on a townhouse stoop. It was as if they smelled his weakness in the damp air and came to investigate. Unconcerned by the rain, their hoods were pulled over their heads and their eyes crept out to watch silently as he walked by. He prayed he would be able hear their sneakered feet behind him if they approached. It was all he could do to keep from running. When he found the nerve, a block later, to look back, he discovered no one was there. The streets were deserted.

  At home, he collapsed into his sagging bed, but not before taking two sleeping pills and turning off his telephone ringer. After ten minutes, the drilling faded to a dull buzz.

  • • •

  He woke with his receiver in his hand, spouting static into his ear. It was early in the morning, and he couldn’t remember answering the telephone. The ringing clawed deep into his temples.

  Two aspirin and a plate of breakfast did little to alleviate the feeling. He intended to call his doctor's office from work but when he arrived he found the telephone was only a mass of crackling static there, too. He wondered if the storm had knocked down the lines for the entire city.

  Again, the library was empty, and while Jocelyn was surprisingly punctual, she arrived harried and breathless. Her face was as wet as her clothes, and she quietly sniffled as she hung her raincoat and hat upon the hook. She also arrived empty-handed — carrying only a smell of rot that had grown so strong he couldn't be near her. She seemed unaware of it though, her mind preoccupied by something that twisted her face into distraction.

  "Raymond, did you...have you..." she started, before deciding against it, turning from him and watching the window. Raymond avoided her after that, wandering instead through the stacks, looking at the medical books for an idea of what could be wrong with his hearing.

  By late afternoon she was sitting quietly beside him at the front desk, over an arm's length away, lost in contemplation. He tried to act normal, as if his head wasn't throbbing or his eyes tearing from the odor of garbage about her. From the edge of his vision he saw Jocelyn turn and stare at him. "What?" he asked. "What is it now?"

  "Aren’t you going to get that?"

  "Get what?"

  She pointed past him and he turned to look. The outside line on the telephone was flashing. He'd been unable to differentiate it from the sound ringing in his head.

  He stumbled, "I didn’t..."

  Exasperated, she muttered something Raymond missed and picked up the receiver. Her end of the conversation was quiet, mumbled with her back toward him, making what she said impossible to hear. After a moment, she hurriedly hung up looking confused and told him she was leaving. She didn’t explain why, she just put on her coat and hat and gathered her things.

  She stood outside the library waiting, her figure misshapen by the rain coursing down the window, only her purple slicker identifying her blur. She stood there in the light of the library for ten minutes while Raymond watched from behind the counter, watched until a second darker blur appeared. It approached Jocelyn, seemed to engulf her, and after a brief entanglement both disappeared into the rain. He looked over at the telephone but despite what he heard, it was no longer ringing.

  • • •

  The rain pounded the windows with varying intensity, and it made Raymond feel uneasy, anxious. He had locked the doors immediately after Jocelyn had left, seeing no sense in remaining open.

  Outside, buildings were reduced to a series of lights, their edifices obscured by the rain pushing against them. Raymond’s umbrella did little to prevent him from getting wet; damp seeped through the lining of his overcoat, weighing his shoulders down.

  Regent Park was deserted. Windows rattled under the storm, animals caged behind each of them. The stench was the worst part of it all. It smelled of decay and foulness and thick dark earth. The umbrella's canopy only accumulated the haze, preventing the wind from clearing away the odorous miasma from his face.

  The noise in his head was getting louder. Each ring was more pronounced than its predecessor, as though the source was getting closer to him, or he to it. Raymond's head throbbed and scratching at it did not dull the pain.

  It wasn’t until he stood in the mouth of the tiny cramped alley, no more than an arm's length wide, that Raymond realized the sound was no longer directionless. The opening was so slight, had he taken a single step too far the gap would have been swallowed by the filthy brick and spray-paint, yet down its length he saw a covered pay telephone with cracked and smeared windows, pale light flickering with each telephone ring. The sound was impossibly clear over the heavy rain. Beyond it, Raymond could see nothing but black.

  The alle
y was too narrow for his umbrella, and the short walk without it open finished soaking him. It was a difficult journey; the entire length was strewn with torn garbage, the stains appearing black in the dim glow, and it stunk worse than anything he'd experienced thus far. Each foot sank ankle-deep into the piles and the slick from the rain made his trip to the pay telephone treacherous — he managed to twice scrape his shoulder falling into the brick. Strong as his desperation was, he didn't belong there, but before he could turn back the unexpected happened: the corridor opened up.

  The shadows yielded a small common square enclosed by four buildings. Other than the telephone, the area — no more than twelve hundred square feet — counted a small metal playground as its only other possession. It looked as though it had once been a private park for the surrounding residents, but weeds and debris had squeezed the grass out, and any play equipment was ripped to its metal joints or burned to a collapsed frame. The lack of sleeping bags or blankets was surprising, though; it looked a place where the homeless or addicted would take refuge, yet there were no signs of life in the opening.

  Pressed into one of the building's walls was the covered pay telephone, a halo of alien symbols spray-painted around it. It was old, still with a rotary dial and a slot that took dimes. The mouthpiece was cracked and scuffed and jumped in its cradle as each ring ran through it. Dubious, Raymond picked up the receiver, wet despite being shielded by the hard plastic roof. The ringing, both from the telephone and in his head, stopped. He sighed uncomfortably. Raymond wiped the earpiece across his sleeve, then suspiciously held up the receiver.