The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  The next month was an ordeal of phone calls, two, three, four times a week. After the initial flourish of apologies and recriminations, we veered wildly between forced cheerfulness and poorly concealed resentment. Once Kaitlyn started to say that Chris was very upset about the entire situation, and I told her I wasn’t interested in hearing about that fucking freak. Another time, she complained that she was lonely, to which I replied that I was sure she could find company. Rather than slamming the receiver down, she cajoled me, told me not to be that way, she missed me and couldn’t wait until she could see me. However, when I at last drove to see her one Thursday afternoon, Kaitlyn was reserved, almost formal. I wanted nothing more than to go straight to bed, to find in her naked body some measure of reassurance that we would recover from this. Kaitlyn demurred, repeatedly, until I left early, in an obvious huff.

  Strangely, Kaitlyn’s infidelity and its jagged aftermath only increased my desire to move to Albany. Those moments regret and anger weren’t gnawing at me, I told myself that, had I been there with her, this never would have happened. I could just about shift the blame for her sleeping with Chris onto us having been apart after so long so close together. There were times I could, not exactly pardon what Chris had done, but understand it. Underwriting my effort to reconcile myself to events was my desire to escape my home. As far as I could tell, my father and mother were no worse than any of my friends’ parents – and, in one or two cases, they seemed significantly better – but I was past tired of having to be home by twelve and to call if I were going to be later, of having to play chauffeur to my mother and three younger siblings, of having to watch what I said lest my father and I begin an argument from which I inevitably backed off, because he had suffered a heart attack ten years earlier and I was deeply anxious not to be the cause of a second, fatal one. Although I was their oldest child, my parents had a much harder time easing their hold on me than they did with my siblings. My younger brother was already away at RPI, enrolled in their Bio-Med program, while my sisters enjoyed privileges I still dreamed of. When I had started at SUNY Huguenot, my father had assured me that, if I commuted to college the first year, I could move onto campus my sophomore year; during a subsequent disagreement, he insisted that the deal had been for me to remain home for two years, and then he and my mother would see about me living in a dorm. After that, I didn’t raise the issue again, nor did he or my mother.

  Albany/Kaitlyn was my opportunity to extricate myself from the life that seemed intent on maintaining my residence under the roof that had sheltered me for the last two decades. Every awkward conversation with Kaitlyn shook my hopes of leaving the bed whose end my feet hung over, while the arguments, aftershocks of that original revelation, that struck us shuddered my dream of Albany to rubble. That I went from the black mood that fell on me after Kaitlyn and I had concluded our latest brittle exchange, when I was convinced I would live and die in Poughkeepsie, to driving to my new apartment and job was a testament to almost brute determination. In the end, I had to leave my parents’, which meant I had to do whatever was necessary to slice through the apron strings mummifying me, and if that included working through things with Kaitlyn – if it included making peace with Chris, accepting him as her friend – then that was what I would do.

  Not only did I make peace with Chris, he was to be my roommate. What would have been impossible, inconceivable, a month before became first plausible and then my plan when I failed to find a place I could afford on my own, and the guy with whom Chris had previously been rooming abruptly moved out. Enough time had passed, I told myself. According to Kaitlyn, Chris was a night owl; he and I would hardly see one another. (I didn’t dwell on how she knew this.) I decided I would stay there only until I could find another, better place, and then fuck you, Chris.

  As it turned out, though, after more than a year, I was still in that apartment on State Street, in what I referred to as student-hell housing. Ours was the lower half of a two-storey house wedged in among other two-storey houses, the majority of them family residences that had been re-purposed for college students. My room was at the rear of the place, off the kitchen, and was entered through a kind of folding door more like what you’d find on a closet. Chris inhabited the front room, next to the combination living room-dining room; between us, there was an empty room opposite the bathroom. For reasons unclear to me, that room had remained unoccupied, though I didn’t object to the extra distance from Chris. Kaitlyn had been right: he was up late into the night, sequestered in his room, which he did not invite me into and whose door – a single solid piece of wood some previous tenant had painted dark green – he kept closed. Probably the longest conversation I had with him had come when he’d showed me the basement, whose door, outside mine, was locked by a trio of deadbolts. The stairs down to it bowed perceptibly under my weight, the railing planted a splinter in the base of my thumb. A pair of bare bulbs threw yellow light against the cement walls, the dirt floor. The air was full of dust; I sneezed. Chris showed me the location of the fuse box, how to reset the fuses, the furnace and how to reset it. After I’d been through the procedures for both a couple of times, I pointed to the corner opposite us and said, “What’s down there?”

  Chris looked at the concrete circle, maybe two and a half feet in diameter, set into the basement floor. A heavy metal bar flaked with rust lay across it; through holes in either end of the bar, thick, heavily-rusted chains ran to rings set into smaller pieces of concrete. He shrugged. “I’m not sure. The landlord told me it used to be a coal cellar, but that doesn’t make any sense. Some kind of access to the sewers, maybe.”

  “In a private residence?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know.”

  When he wasn’t in his room, Chris was at SUNY, either in class or at the library. Despite this, I saw him a good deal more than I would have wished, especially when Kaitlyn stayed over, which she did on weekends and occasional weeknights. I would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner, while Kaitlyn sat on the green and yellow couch in the living room, reading for one of her classes, and I would hear Chris’s door creak open. By the time I carried Katilyn’s plate through to the folding table that served as the dining-room table, Chris would be leaning against the wall across from her, his arms crossed, talking with her about school. Although they stiffened perceptibly as I set Kaitlyn’s plate down, they continued their conversation, until I asked Chris if he wanted to join us, there was plenty left, an offer he inevitably refused, politely, claiming he needed to return to his work. During the ensuing meal, Kaitlyn would maintain a constant stream of chatter to which I, preoccupied with what she and Chris had actually been discussing, would respond in monosyllables. If the phone rang and Chris happened to answer it, he would linger for a minute or two, talking in a low, pleasant murmur I couldn’t decipher before calling to me that it was Kaitlyn. I knew they met for coffee at school every now and again, which seemed to translate into once a week.

  Of course the situation was intolerable. Forgiving Chris – believing that what had occurred between him and Kaitlyn was in the past – accepting that they were still friends, but no more than that – all of it had been much easier when I was eighty miles removed from it, when it was a means to the end of me leaving home. As a fact of my daily life, it was a wound that would not heal, whose scab tore free whenever the two of them were in any kind of proximity, whenever Kaitlyn mentioned Chris, or (less frequently) vice-versa. Had I known him before this, had we shared some measure of friendship, there might have been another basis on which I could have dealt with Chris. As it was, my principal picture of him was as the guy who had slept with my girlfriend. No matter that we might share the occasional joke, or that he might join Kaitlyn and me when we went to listen to music at local clubs and bars, and try to point out what the musicians were doing well, or even that he might cover my rent one month I needed to have work done on my car, I could not see past that image, and it tormented me. I was more than half-convinced Kaitlyn wanted to
return to him, and her protests that, if she had, she would have already, did little to persuade me otherwise.

  One night, after I’d been in Albany six months, in the wake of a fierce argument that ended with Kaitlyn telling me she was tired of doing penance for a mistake she’d made a year ago, then slamming her apartment door in my face, and me speeding home down Western Avenue’s wide expanse, I stood outside Chris’s room, ready for a confrontation twelve months overdue. I hadn’t bothered to remove my coat, and it seemed to weigh heavier, hotter. My chest was heaving, my hands balled into fists so tight my arms shook. The green door was at the far end of a dark tunnel. I could hear the frat boys who lived above us happily shouting back and forth to one another about a professor who was a real dick. I willed Chris to turn the doorknob, to open his door so that he would find me there and I could ask him what it had been like, if she’d pulled her shirt over her head, pushed down her jeans, or if he’d unhooked her bra, slid her panties to her ankles? Had she lain back on the bed, drawing him onto her, and had she uttered that deep groan when he’d slid all the way up into her? Had she told him to fuck her harder, and when she’d ridden him to that opening of her mouth and closing of her eyes, had she slid her hand between them to cup and squeeze his balls, bringing him to a sudden, thunderous climax? A year’s worth of scenes I’d kept from my mind’s eye cavorted in front of it: Kaitlyn recumbent on her bed, her bare body painted crimson by the red light she’d installed in the bedside lamp; Kaitlyn, lying on top of a hotel room table, wearing only the rings on her fingers, her hands pulling her knees up and out; Kaitlyn with her head hanging down, her arms out in front of her, hands pressed against the shower wall, her legs straight and spread, soapy water sluicing off her back, her ass. In all of these visions and more, it was not I who was pushing in and out of her, it was Chris – he had spliced himself into my memories, turned them into so much cheap porn. Worse, the look I envisioned on Kaitlyn’s face said, shouted that she was enjoying these attentions far more than any I’d ever paid her.

  While I desperately wanted to cross the remaining distance to Chris’s door and smash my fists against it, kick it in, some inner mechanism would not permit me to take that first step. My jaw ached I was clenching my teeth so hard, but I could not convert that energy into forward motion. If Chris appeared, then what would happen, would happen. In the meantime, the best I could do was maintain my post.

  Perhaps Kaitlyn had called to warn him, but Chris did not leave his room that night. I stood trembling at his door for the better part of an hour, after which I decided to wait for him on the living-room couch. I had not yet removed my coat, and I was sweltering. The couch was soft. My lids began to droop. I yawned, then yawned again. The room was growing harder to keep in focus. There was a noise – I thought I heard something. The sound of feet, of many feet, seemed to be outside the front window – no, they were underneath me, in the basement. The next thing I knew, I was waking to early morning light. I could have resumed my position outside Chris’s door; instead, I retreated to my room. That was the closest I came to facing him.

  Had a friend of mine related even part of the same story to me – told me that his girlfriend had cheated on him, or that he couldn’t stop thinking about her betrayal, or that he was sharing an apartment with the other guy – my advice would have been simple: leave. You’re in a no-win situation; get out of it. I was in possession of sufficient self-knowledge to be aware of this, but was unable to attach that recognition to decisive action. In an obscure way I could perceive but not articulate, this failing was connected to my larger experience of Albany, which had been, to say the least, disappointing. Two weeks into it, I had started having doubts about my job at The Book Nook; after a month, those doubts had solidified. Within two months of starting there, I was actively, though discreetly, searching for another position. However, with the economy mired in recession, jobs were scarce on the ground. None of the local bookstores were hiring full-time. I sank three hundred dollars into the services of a job placement company whose representative interviewed me by phone for an hour and produced a one-page resume whose bland and scanty euphemisms failed to impress me, or any of the positions to which I sent it. I wasted an hour late one Tuesday sitting a test for an insurance position the man who interviewed me told me I was unlikely to get because I didn’t know anyone in the area, and so didn’t have a list of people I could start selling to. (He was right: they didn’t call me.) I lost an entire Saturday shadowing a travelling salesman as he drove to every beauty salon in and around Albany, hawking an assortment of cheap and gaudy plastic wares to middle-aged women whose faces had shown their suspicion the moment he hauled open their doors. That position I could have had if I’d wanted it, but the prospect was so depressing I returned to The Book Nook the following day. When I heard that their pay was surprisingly good and their benefits better, I seriously considered taking the exam that would allow me to apply for a job as a toll collector on the Thruway, going so far as to find out the dates on which and the locations where the test was being offered. But, unable to imagine telling my parents that I had left the job that at least appeared to have something to do with my undergraduate degree in English for one that required no degree at all – unwilling to face what such a change would reveal about my new life away from home – I never went. I continued to work at The Book Nook, using my employee discount to accumulate novels and short story collections I didn’t read, and for which I soon ran out of space, so that I had to stack them on my floor, until my room became a kind of improvised labyrinth.

  Nor did the wider world appear to be in any better shape. In addition to its reports on the faltering local and national economies, WAMC, the local public radio station, brought news of the disintegration of Yugoslavia into ethnic enclaves whose sole purpose appeared to be the annihilation of one another through the most savage means possible. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, which had promised brighter days, an end to the nuclear shadow under which I’d grown up, instead had admitted a host of hatreds and grievances kept at bay but not forgotten, and eager to have their bloody day. On EQX, the alternative station out of Vermont, U2 sang about the end of the world, and the melodramatic overstatement of those words seemed to summarise my time in Albany.

  By that Wednesday night in November, when I fumbled open the door to the apartment and stumbled in, the Scotches I’d consumed at the QE2 not done with me yet, I had been living in a state of ill-defined dread for longer than I could say, months, at least. I had attempted discussing it with Kaitlyn over dinner the week before we went to see Marius, but the best I could manage was to say that it felt as if I were waiting for the other shoe to drop. “What other shoe?” Kaitlyn had said around a mouthful of dumpling. “The other shoe to what?”

  I’d considered answering, “To you and Chris,” but we’d been having a nice time, and I had been reluctant to spoil it. To be honest, though there was no doubt she and Chris were part of the equation, they weren’t all of it: there were other integers involved whose values I could not identify. To reply, “To everything” had seemed too much, so I’d said, “I don’t know,” and the conversation had moved on.

  Yet when I saw that the apartment was dark, and a check of my room showed my bed empty, and a call to Kaitlyn’s brought me her answering machine, I knew, with a certainty fuelled by alcohol and that deep anxiety, that the other shoe had finally clunked on the floor.

  III

  For the next couple of days, I continued to dial Kaitlyn’s number, leaving a series of messages that veered from blasé to reproachful to angry to conciliatory before cycling back to blasé. I swore that I was not going to her apartment, a vow I kept for almost three days, when I used my key to unlock her door Saturday night. I half-expected the chain to be fastened, Kaitlyn to be inside (and not alone), but the door swung open on an empty room. The lights were off. “Kaitlyn?” I called. “Love?”

  There was no answer. The apartment
was little more than a studio with ambition; it took all of a minute for me to duck my head into the bedroom, the bathroom, to determine that Kaitlyn wasn’t there. The answering machine’s tally read thirty-one messages; I pressed Play and listened to my voice ascend and descend the emotional register. Mixed in among my messages were brief how-are-you’s from Kaitlyn’s mother, her younger brother, and Chris. When I recognised his voice, I tensed, but he had called to say he had missed her at the show the other night, as well as for coffee the next day, and he hoped everything was okay. After the last message – me, half an hour prior, trying for casual as I said that I was planning to stop by on my way home from work – I ran through the recordings a second time, searching for something, some clue in her mother’s, her younger brother’s words to where she had spent the last seventy-two hours. That I could hear, there was none. An hour’s wait brought neither Kaitlyn nor any additional phone calls, so I left, locking the door behind me.

  Two days later, I asked Chris to call Kaitlyn’s parents. He was just in from a late-night library session; I had waited for him on the couch. He didn’t notice me until he was about to open the door to his room. At my request, he stopped pulling off his gloves and said, “What?”

  “I need you to call Kaitlyn’s parents for me.”

  “Why?”