The Torment of Rachel Ames

by Jeff Gunhus

  "Sisyphus is mad. But he just walks down the mountain, stretches out his muscles and… can you guess what he does?"

  "Starts again."

  "Right," Ollie says, eyes on fire like he’s the Greek king looking up to the top of the mountain. The slow, mumbling speech pattern he’d had when she’d first met him is long gone. He’s on a roll. "Sisyphus just leans his back into that rock and he heaves it up the mountain. This time it’s twice as hard cause his muscles are sore, his arms are all chewed up, he's bleeding from cuts all over. But, he pushes on. Up the mountain. To the top. To the promise of recompense and forgiveness, salvation and eternal paradise."

  The words roll off his tongue so easily that they sound like he’s quoting from memory, maybe a hymn or a recent sermon. She thinks Ollie has missed his calling as a preacher. He could have been a real Bible-thumper, filling tents nightly on weekdays and three times on the weekends. If he hadn't been so busy sweeping leaves in the forest, that is.

  "But when he gets near the top," Ollie's voice is low now, almost a whisper, like it’s just the two of them in the whole wide world that will know the story and how it ends. "Just as he's gonna get it over the top, BAM!” He claps his massive hands together and the sound literally echoes through the forest and she jumps back. "That rock rolls back down the mountain, through the bushes and the trees and the rocks. All the way down to the exact spot where he started." Ollie pauses here and takes stock of his audience of one. Rachel thinks she must have the right expression he's looking for because he smiles wide.

  "Sisyphus may have been a sinner. He may have done some bad doo-doo to make the gods so angry. But one thing is for sure, he’s not stupid. He sees that the rock has come to rest in the exact same place not once, but twice in a row. And he knows the terrible thing."

  "That the gods aren't ever going to let him win," she whispers.

  Ollie moves his hands through the air like he's a magician who just made a rabbit appear out of thin air. "It's futile," he says, loading the word with all the gravitas of his deep baritone delivery. "Totally and utterly futile."

  "Like sweeping the leaves off a hiking trail in autumn," she says as if he's the one missing the point of his own story.

  But Ollie wags his finger like she's been a particularly bad student. "Sisyphus knows what’s going on. He knows he can't win, so you know what he does? He lowers his shoulder into the rock and heads to the top of the mountain. It rolls down again and he starts again. Fails. Tries again. Fails. Tries again. Fails. Tries again."

  "Why?"

  "Don’t you see? It’s because that’s the last part of him that’s still alive," Ollie says. "No matter the chance of him making it, no matter if the gods are all lined up against him, trying is all he’s got. It’s all any of us has got. That’s that makes us human. We just keep on going no matter what’s thrown at us. Picking our way through. Finding a way to keep breathing one day after the other. Even when it’s futile.” Ollie clutches his broom with both hands. "And the minute any of us give that up, then we’re just lost forever, aren’t we?"

  She feels like Ollie expects something from her. Applause? Tears? An answer? An Oh my God moment where she admits sweeping leaves in the forest is a noble cause? She can't do any of those things so she stares at him.

  He kicks the leaves at his feet. When he talks, his speech has slowed again and he mumbled his words. “Sorry, didn’t mean to get on my soapbox or nothing. Momma says I run my mouth too much sometimes.”

  “No,” she says. “It was a fine story. I’m glad you told it. Really, I am.”

  An awkward silence stretches out between them.

  "So?” he finally asks. “What d'ya think of all that?"

  She laughs. "Ollie, I think this is the oddest couple of days I've ever had. For a place that's supposed to be isolated I've had a run of interesting conversations recently. My landlord is an odd duck. There's that freak show Granger from across the lake. And now—"

  "You've been meeting with Granger?" Ollie says, his eyes wide, almost bulging. "Why didn't you tell me that?"

  She takes a step back, not liking his tone. "What's the big deal?"

  Ollie steps toward her. His bulky body seems larger close up, more muscular than she realized. She has a flash of insight that if she screams, he could snap her neck like it was no more than a chicken bone if he wanted. Maybe doing it by accident from trying to quiet her because he doesn’t know his own strength.

  "You never saw me, you understand?" Ollie says, his voice dark and menacing. "And don’t you dare ever say we talked."

  She backs up, ready to run if she needs to. Then something occurs to her and she stops her retreat.

  "You’re scared of him,” she says. “Of Granger. Why? He’s just an old man.”

  Ollie's face loses all the anger and intimidation he tried to direct at her. He softens and the angel with the carryin' voice is back.

  "I'm so sorry, miss," he says, looking like he might cry. "Didn’t mean to raise my voice. I should've never stopped working. Should’ve kept to myself like I’m supposed to. I hope things work out for you. I really do. Just please don't mention my name."

  "I won't," she says. “I promise.”

  His face looks so thankful when she agrees to keep the secret that she can't bring herself to use it as leverage to get more information out of him.

  "I won't tell him regardless," she says. "But will you tell me why you're so scared of him?"

  Ollie shakes his head. Somehow, even with all of his size he looks like a kid standing there, twisting the broom handle with his hands. "I can't tell you that. It's just not the way things work around here."

  "Ollie, what the hell are you talking about?"

  Ollie turns his back to her and sweeps the path. Slow, deliberate strokes of his broom. He mutters over and over, "It’s just not how things work around here. It’s just not how things work around here."

  Chapter Six

  Rachel wakes just as the sun begins to set behind the mountains on the far side of the lake. She’s up with a start, a disoriented jump from the darkness of sleep into the flesh and blood reality of the world. There’s a panicked gasp of air as she pushes away a heavy weight smothering her.

  But there’s nothing there. Only a faint echo of a dream that she senses was brilliant Technicolor only seconds earlier, but now disintegrates wherever she tries to grasp it. All that’s left of the dream is the smell of the world burning, lingering strongly enough that she searches the room for signs of smoke, thinking her dream world had stolen the idea from the real. But there is nothing. Only the couch where she napped, the dining table where Underwood smirks at her, still unused, and the kitchen, as equally ignored as the typewriter. No smoke. No fire. It’s no matter because all thoughts of either drift away with the rest of her forgotten dream and she lets it happen. There’s no fight in her to remember. She didn’t come to the cabin to remember, anyway.

  She stands and stretches, shocked by how long she’s slept. There’s no clock or watch in the house or on her person, one of her writing retreat rules, but the light outside tells her the story. As the final bit of sun ducks behind the mountain in that curious sped up way typical of the last seconds of the sunset, she has a foreboding sense that time is somehow moving faster than it should. But that’s crazy, just her imagination taking advantage of her blurry state of mind.

  That’s jus’ not how things work around here.

  It’s Ollie’s voice in her head, but somehow she knows he’s right. Time doesn’t move faster here. It’s not how things work.

  Thinking of work, she walks over to the dining room table and is surprised to see a piece of paper rolled into Underwood’s gleaming paper feeder, the metal bar snug against it, ready for business.

  “You hoping to get lucky tonight, big guy?” she says. She waits, half-expecting the keys to thump out an answer to her question. But they don’t. They haven’t for a long time. “Let me use the bathroom first,” she says. “Help yourself to
a drink.”

  She turns to the sliding door to go outside but stops herself, surprised to find she means to pee outside. She’s embarrassed by the idea even though there’s no one else there. “Get a grip,” she mumbles, walking through the cabin and using the bathroom like a normal person. When she’s done, she pours herself a drink from the bottle in the kitchen, then returns to the table to face her tormentor.

  Fingers on the keys. White page ready for her brilliance. Begging for it. And she wants to give it. More than that, she wants to stuff it down Underwood’s throat so hard he gags on it.

  Her fingers move, slow at first, tentative. Then faster, speed building and building, until she’s dancing over the keys. The metal prongs, each with its own letter, smack through the black ink ribbon and stamp the paper. Her left hand swats the return register without being told when it’s time to do so. This is it, the old magic. She closes her eyes, swaying to the musicality of the words in her head, relishing the sense of them traveling through her nervous system in electrical impulses telling her hands what to do. Loving that all of it, this dance, this kinetic energy, this alchemy of creation, is thoughts made real. All she has to do to see inside her own mind is open her eyes, look at the page and see…

  …a half-page of neat typing. First line indented. Hyphenated words at right margin. Two paragraph breaks. Lines of dialogue in quotes. And not a single actual word that makes sense.

  Gibberish.

  All of it.

  She rocks back in her chair. The slew of jumbled consonants and vowels blur from the tears in her eyes. She closes her hands into fists, not wanting to see the fingers that betrayed her trust. At that moment, bursting through the veil that’s dropped down over her mind, comes the image of a man typing at a desk. She knows the place in this image, it’s called the Overlook Hotel and she’d been there many times. The man looks up as if she’s standing in the room with him and points to the manuscript on his desk. She already knows what’s there but looks anyway. Page after page of the phrase, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The man rips the page from this typewriter and shakes it at her. “You can’t even form a goddamn word?” he yells, crushes the paper in his hand and throws it at her. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  BAM

  A sound shakes the image from her head. The angry man and his piece of paper are gone.

  BAM

  BAM

  Something at the door. The one between the living room and the kitchen. She only uses the sliding door on the deck to come and go, but this door faces the road. It’s dark and she doesn’t expect anyone. A wave of terror passes through her as she immediately thinks of every murder and torture scene she’s ever written or considered writing.

  BAM

  The door shakes with each hit. The top half of it is glass, separated into four panes. She draws a sharp breath when she sees movement through the window. But she can’t make out what it is. Maybe the wolves she heard last night? But wolves didn’t use doors, did they?

  If it’s someone knocking, they’re using a forearm or their foot. Or knuckles they didn’t mind pummeling into a bloody mess.

  BAM

  She has a panicked moment thinking that it’s the man from the Overlook Hotel, but she remembers that’s impossible. The man is from someone else’s mind. He’s someone else’s responsibility.

  BAM

  One of the squares of glass breaks and this wakes her up from her frozen state. She grabs the gun on the table next to Underwood, not even having realized it was there. Over to the kitchen, doing her best not to be seen by whoever is outside the door.

  BAM

  Now that she’s closer, she can see that there’s a single trail of blood dripping down the inside of the door from where the glass is broken. Her breath comes in short, ragged pants and she can’t control her shaking hands. She steals a look outside and sees a black shape fly at the door.

  BAM

  She lets out a short scream as more glass breaks. Something flutters outside. She reaches out to the wall and flips a switch to turn on the light outside. It doesn’t work. The door shakes again from another collision.

  BAM.

  She flips the switch up and down. Still dark. Of course it is. The generator’s not on.

  The second this thought crosses her mind, the light outside flickers on, then flares so bright that she has to shy away from it.

  Through squinted eyes, she turns back to see that the glass is smeared with blood and black feathers.

  She opens the door even though she really doesn’t want to. On the small landing is a massive bird. She can only see its body but its hulking mass reminds her of a turkey vulture, the carrion eater always cleaning up the deer carcasses on the side of roads. But there’s something different about this one. Its black feathers look oily in the light from the porch’s single light bulb, but also mottled, holes eaten through, covered in dirt and cobwebs. One wing is bent backward, clearly broken, even a white flash of bone sticking out as it thrashes on the ground.

  Then she sees the head.

  Featherless. Raw flesh oozing blood. Two oversized eye sockets, one empty with a festering sore. The other a maniac’s eye, rolling around, unable to stop itself. The mouth isn’t a bird’s. It’s human. With cracked, blistered lips that are pressed together and sewn shut with leather string.

  Impossibly, the bird pushes itself off the ground with wiry legs, flaps its one good wing even as the broken one grinds on the exposed bone. It launches itself at her and she screams. With a swing of her arm, she bats the thing away. The gun’s in her hand and smashes into the oozing head, knocking the bird sideways. It hits the ground again, a mewling cry coming from behind its sutured mouth.

  The bird gets back up and cocks its head toward her. That rolling eye comes to rest, locked on her. As she watches, the eye fills with blood, a dribble of it leaking from a puncture in the bottom so that it cries black tears. She sees the bird’s talons, thick and sharp. They clack against the wood of the deck and she has no problem imagining them sunk deep into her flesh.

  The bird lunges. Her hand jerks up and she puts a bullet into its skull right through the one good eye. The back of the bird’s head blows out and the faded paint on the entryway’s railing splatters black. The bird slumps to the ground. Not moving.

  She’s breathing hard, like she’d run a race. The gun feels heavy in her hand and the nose lowers to the ground as she stares at the bird lying in the expanding pool of blood. Not a turkey vulture. Not some prehistoric monster after all.

  Just a common black raven with a broken wing.

  And now with half its head shot off.

  A howl erupts from the forest down closer to the water. Close enough that she jumps at the sound and swings the gun that direction, her hand shaking. There are shadows in the tree line. Five or six from what she can tell. Dark shapes that weave in and out of the trees. She thinks she sees glowing eyes, but she’s not sure. The howls come altogether this time, layering on top of one another until they harmonize into one wistful, terrible note.

  Slowly, she backs into the cabin, the gun swinging back and forth in front of her. She closes the door and locks it. Then she pulls the thin curtain shut across the window as if that could keep out the things after her.

  Because they are after her.

  Somehow she knows this as clearly as she knows her own name. They mean to get her and devour her. They mean to destroy her once and for all.

  The howls come again, so loud that she can’t believe they’re not already somewhere inside the house. She backs into the main room, cursing the sliding glass doors that cover the far wall and leave her so exposed. But the attack doesn’t come from the sliding glass door. When it comes, it’s from the window right in front of her.

  The glass explodes like a bomb’s gone off. She shields her face with her arms but she still feels the sting of the glass shards slicing into her skin. Even so, she risks watching what’s coming through the window. She can’t stop he
rself from seeing it for herself, this thing that’s tracked her down.

  It’s a wolf, this she already knew. But it’s enormous, its head as high as her own. Black mangy fur hangs in matted tufts. Open wounds cover its body, seeping with infection. The thing smells like rotten meat, a sharp rancidity that makes her gag. The wolf snarls, baring black teeth. Its eyes glow with hate and knowing.

  She holds up the gun and screams at the beast. “Leave me alone!”

  The wolf leaps at her. She fires the gun and the window shatters behind the creature.

  Still, the blast from the gun gets the beast’s attention and makes it twist in midair to miss her. It knocks into the table, sending Underwood and the paper flying. The wolf scrambles to find its balance. If she has her way, it never will.

  She pulls the trigger as fast as she can, the blasts from the gun drowning out her screams.

  But the wolf is quick, more nimble than she expected, and is back on its feet. It doesn’t react to the bullets she knows must be hitting it. She thinks it will take a run at her and it will all be over, but instead it jumps over the couch and bounds out of the cabin through the window.