Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Now he motioned from the pantry. Or from the closet near the stair. He robbed the cats of their small portions of food. The guests at the dining table tried to ignore him, but some were less successful than others. Some quickly lost their appetites and did not survive.

  At night he would stand in the shadows, watching new guests arrive, making their way slowly towards the dark house in the field, its windows full of night, the dark hat removed from a bald head beckoning from the open door.

  Welcome, he thought. You’ll need no money here. Worrying is a waste of time.

  Underground

  They had started in April to excavate the block across from Tom’s apartment building. Now it was September, and because of work stoppages and other delays there was still the largest hole Tom had ever seen right in the middle of the city, and right in the middle of his life. The library research company he worked for had its offices in a building at the north edge of this giant, muddy hole. Certainly it was a rare moment when he’d noticed any dry earth around the site. September’s rainfall had been the heaviest on record. He’d read in the papers that the construction company had had some trouble with slides at the site. Two workers had been killed. Experts had been called in from more rainy climates to offer their recommendations.

  He often considered whether Willie would live long enough to see the new complex. Willie had always been an avid fan of new construction, especially projects this complicated. Staring out the window into the squarish crater filled Tom with doubt. He wasn’t sure he believed there was enough steel, stone, and concrete in the state to fill such a hole. Construction projects were often as unpredictable as a ravaging disease. The holes in Willie’s immune system would not be easy to fill, either. As the complex was beginning a dramatic rise out of the raw wound of ground, Willie was slowly, inexorably, being sucked back into it.

  The height of the dirt walls at the site impressed him. When the digging had first begun, he’d walked close to the site each day, spending time at the various peepholes cut into the temporary roofed walkways around its perimeter. He’d been surprised at the fecundity of the earth; even at a depth of a hundred feet or more it was rich and moist like cake.

  Topsoil was supposedly only a few feet deep, but here he could see roots and animal holes and insect tracks and all the dark strata of decades of decay meant to feed generations of new life that went far deeper than that. Impossibly deep, he thought. The living feeding off the dead. After a week, the machines were still uncovering small animal skeletons and black compost. After two weeks of this grave robbing Tom stopped visiting, trotting through the walkways briskly as he went from apartment to job and back again.

  A park over a portion of the site had now vanished into the cavity. Four or five cast statues—a general on a horse, a standing man with his hand on a book—had been lifted out of the way and temporarily stored in a blocked-off portion of street that once ran alongside the park. There were also a couple of old stone statues in the lot, badly weathered and veined heavily with black. From his office window they looked like bystanders, gone to the edge of the pit to see what lay inside.

  He had a poor understanding of what was required for such constructions; he had no idea why they would need to dig a hole so large. He tried to imagine how many years of the city’s history they had ripped away. How many skeletons of cats and dogs, family pets buried in the back yard? On the news they’d reported the discovery of a human skull within the last week, thought to be over a century old. Foul play was not suspected. They thought it might have drifted down from the cemetery a half-mile away. Tom tried to imagine such a thing, dead bodies drifting underground, swimming slowly through what most of us liked to think of as too solid ground.

  But they weren’t bodies anymore, exactly. Separate bones, the flesh gone to earth. Now it seemed as if the buried skeletons had discarded their old suits of flesh and slipped on the entire world as their new bodies. The world’s movements had become the movements of the ancient dead, its dance their dance, its seasons their dreams of birth, death, and renewal. So maybe he himself was just a reflection of some dead man’s forgotten desire.

  Willie would have liked that conceit, Tom thought. He might have laughed at the elaborateness of it, but it still would have meant something to him. Now Willie had good reason to appreciate such an image. Tom liked to imagine Willie alive, doing the things they’d always done together, making plans, watching the city change even if most of the time they thought it was for the worse. But Willie wasn’t going to be a watcher anymore. Willie was about to become part of the rest of the world.

  The basement of Willie’s house had been crumbling for decades. Tom had warned him against buying the place, sure that someday the entire structure would collapse, but Willie had just shrugged, saying that he loved the upstairs too much not to have it, the cool and the old world charm of it, and in the meantime continued a practice begun by the previous owners: filling the basement cavity with whatever clean fill dirt he could find, packing it down, adding occasional large rocks for more mass. Now it was the structure of Willie himself that was collapsing, and the basement was almost full with a half-dozen or more varieties of earth.

  Tom struggled with his key in Willie’s front door, the lock out of true, the door itself beginning to list noticeably to the right. The ground’s coming up to get you, Willie, he thought, and grimaced as the key began to bend just before the door popped open. He glanced at the key once, ran his finger along the warp of it, turned, and tossed it out into the front yard. He wouldn’t be needing it after today. The yard was almost barren—Willie had let it go after he was diagnosed, and refused to let Tom, or anyone else, do anything with it. Damp red clods of earth heavy with worms showed through vague whiskers of greyish grass, the dirt loose and clumpy as if it had frothed up above the roots and stems, leaving only the tallest plants exposed. The flower beds were a sea of jagged, dark stalks.

  He stepped inside onto a discolored patch of carpet. Dirt followed him in, clouds of it forming in the bright light. There used to be a dark green awning over the front door, but somewhere along the line it had disappeared. He looked down at the filthy rug, troubled by all the dirt. He stepped back out onto the single step that was meant to raise a visitor to the level of the door. It was as if it had dropped several inches during last month’s heavy rains, leaving only a vague lip above the ground. But Tom knew that couldn’t be—if that had been the case the step up to the door would have been far steeper than before. He stared at the threshold. Willie’s entire front yard appeared to have risen. The seemingly solid ground rubbed at the bottom of Willie’s front door. Trails of dark brown earth had crept up over the worn oak threshold until parts of it were submerged. Oh, Willie, you didn’t stand a chance, he thought, and stepped quickly back inside, away from this determined stretch of ground. He pushed the door shut firmly, forcing a cloud of earthy smell up into his face.

  “Is that you, Mr. Davison?” John, Willie’s last lover and now Willie’s nurse, stood in glaring light at the top of the stairs. He’d always called him Mr. Davison, and Tom had always felt vaguely insulted by the formality. Tom fumbled with the living-room light switch, but the overhead bulb was dead. The room was shrouded in black. As Tom made his way up the stairs into the light it felt as if the dark had taken on the weight of earth, pulling him back, seducing him with the impulse to lie down, to sink, to fall back and close his eyes. “Mr. Davison, there’s not much time.” John reached out and grabbed Tom’s hand as if to reel him in. The gesture made Tom uncomfortable, but he permitted John to help him up the remaining steps.

  Willie’s bedroom door was half open. Tom stopped with the impulse to knock, then, suddenly angry, pushed the door the rest of the way, slamming it against the edge of Willie’s bed. He had never been expected to knock before; he wasn’t going to end things knocking.

  “We’re not doing well today, I’m afraid,” John said behind him. Tom turned and, without thinking, searched John’s face for evid
ence of sores. John gestured towards the bed, at the bundle of bedding where Willie was supposed to be. He looked down at the edge of the door pressing against the mattress and frowned slightly. Tom felt defensive, as he usually did in John’s presence, but he didn’t want to say anything in front of Willie. Instead he looked away with deliberation, his eyes searching the bed for his old friend as if there were some question as to his whereabouts.

  The dark shadows on the sheets looked like great splotches of dirt, or even excrement. Tom was suddenly filled with rage and started to turn back to John and let him know about it when the cloud cover outside the window changed, and he realized those splotches were actually shadows after all.

  “John … leave us alone … now.” The voice under the sheets was so low Tom could barely recognize it as Willie’s. The throat sounded full. Tom thought of the darkness downstairs, and imagined the loose, grey earth rising up the staircase, eventually filling the mouth of the second floor hall. John looked at Tom with a vaguely troubled expression, then left without protest.

  “I feel bad … I can’t make him … at ease. He’s scared … you know? But I’m glad he’s here. Come … come closer.” It was an eerie feeling, hearing that vaguely recognizable voice coming from beneath the bedclothes, as if Willie were already dead and buried and it was his voice haunting the bed. Tom walked slowly to the head of the bed. “Un … uncover me, will you?” Tom leaned over and pulled away the sheet which had been tucked tightly under the shoulders. Appalled, he felt as if he were unwrapping a mummy.

  Willie looked up at him, his face a mask of sweat, his skin pocked with sores, his eyes dark as if too much makeup had been applied. (“That’s the worst thing, really,” he once said. “I’m starting to look like some old drag queen.’) Tom thought Willie’s flesh looked unstable, as if it might fall off the skull at any moment. He imagined a plate full of such flesh, a grave full of it. “He doesn’t mean to, but … he keeps … covering me … a little too much. So he won’t … have to see.” Willie grinned hideously.

  “Jesus, Willie. That’s horrible. Don’t let him.”

  Willie grinned again. “You don’t … understand us. Not really.”

  Tom felt like turning away, but the grin fascinated him. He realized again it was as if Willie was already dead. It was as if a rock had suddenly smiled at him, as if a patch of bare ground had opened up and grinned at him. The thought worked cruelly through him—after all, Willie was his best friend, he loved Willie—but it refused to be ignored: Willie was well on his way to compost.

  “Don’t let … them bury me.” Tom looked at him in shock, as if his old friend had been reading his mind. Again Willie smiled. Or was it the same smile, and now his face was frozen that way, the words squeezing past the yellowed bars of his teeth? “Make sure … I’m cremated.”

  Tom shook his head. No, I won’t let them, or No, I can’t do that … He wasn’t sure which he intended by the gesture. Willie’s face seemed to be dissolving right in front of him. But his friend wanted help with his last wish, and didn’t he owe him that, even though his friend was already dead? “Why cremation, Willie? Why do you want that?”

  The grin fell away so suddenly Tom thought of magic tricks, Willie wearing a tall dark hat and waving a wand. “I don’t want this body … even hidden under dirt. This isn’t me! … want it … burned away. Let … the rest of me … inside … fly away, Tom. Fly away.”

  “Okay, Willie. Okay.”

  “Don’t … let them. They’ll … bury me.”

  “I promise.”

  It was almost over when John came back into the room. Maybe it already was over. Maybe it had been over months ago. Tom felt as if he had no understanding here, and in that had let his best friend down. Willie had fallen back, unconscious. John went to the side of the bed and grabbed Willie’s hand. He really loves him, Tom thought, the first nice thing he’d ever thought about John, but he couldn’t watch, didn’t even think he should watch. So he left.

  Dirt now covered the entire length of the threshold. Dirt formed a wide, shallow pool over several square feet of the carpet in front of the door. As he stepped into the front yard, dark earth slopped over his shoes and stained his socks. He had a sense of the entire house sinking behind him. He was sure that if he came back to this site in a few weeks he’d find only a barren splotch of ground.

  It was at that point that Tom realized he had no intention of keeping his promise to his old friend. What was he supposed to do, drag the body away in the night? John was Willie’s lover, and what was Tom? A coward of a friend who had been too embarrassed to let other friends know that Willie was gay.

  He turned around in the yard, feeling the need to go back up those stairs and tell Willie that he wouldn’t be keeping his promise, that he was too embarrassed, that he was too frightened, when he again saw the dirt on the carpet, the way it moved, the way it spread. Like a fluid. Liquid ground covering the floor slowly, soon to ascend the stairs in its quest for Willie. And certainly there could be no way of fighting such hungry ground.

  Tom left the yard quickly, intending never to be back.

  At Willie’s funeral Tom said nothing as they lowered him into the ground. The day of the funeral was unusually hot for that time of year. Early in the afternoon a temperature inversion dropped a lid over the city, compressing the air as the cars continued to move over the dusty streets and the heavy machinery continued to chew away at the rich body of the earth. By the time of the late afternoon funeral a thick stew swirled over the tops of the buildings, drifting slowly down into the streets where it forced itself into open windows, cars, and raw, desperate throats.

  At the gravesite John’s eyes met Tom’s briefly as John dropped the first handful of rich, crumbling dirt over the lid. Don’t let them bury me.

  “But the dead have no say in such things, Willie,” Tom thought. “After the ground takes you back it’s the living that get to decide.”

  Never before had he felt such shame. For having been embarrassed. For being one of the living who continue to make decisions for the dead, even if only by default.

  A month after Willie’s funeral the work still continued on the giant hole in the middle of Tom’s world. He couldn’t understand why it was taking so long. The papers mentioned continued delays, but work was obviously taking place—there were simply no indications of impending completion. What disturbed him most was the fact that the hole appeared less uniform, more unfinished, as the work progressed. The excavation had lost its squareness, and now appeared as if something rotted had been removed, as if corruption were distorting the edges of this gigantic earthen wound. Digging had spread past the original wooden walkways and barriers, and some of the bordering buildings appeared in danger of being undermined. Some barriers had actually fallen into the hole, where they were mulched to the point of being indistinguishable from the remaining soil.

  During slow periods at work Tom researched the decomposition rates of flowers, mahogany coffins, and a human body short on fat and muscle following a long, debilitating disease.

  The temperature inversion recurred several times during that month. Some afternoons the air felt abrasive, and tasted of soil. Other days unusually high winds blew dirt out of the excavation and across the windows of the neighboring buildings. From inside his office the windows appeared smeared with urine and feces. One afternoon the office was evacuated because of an air pollution alert. Tom refused to leave, instead choosing to surround himself with piles of crumbling antique volumes—research whose purpose he’d quite forgotten—while he coughed into a dirty handkerchief.

  He’d never intended to go back. But in the will John and Tom had been jointly delegated the task of sorting through Willie’s belongings. John had told him this briefly, curtly over the phone. They’d agreed on a day, then John hung up.

  Yellow signs had been plastered to the outside walls of Willie’s house. The property had been condemned. Tom was hardly surprised—the front door frame had shifted with the l
oose ground until it could no longer be completely closed. Someone had fixed a metal bar across the door, secured by a hefty padlock. This contraption now hung loosely beside the wide open door. Boxes containing a variety of junk were stacked high on either side. The front room contained an inch or more of dirt tattooed with a riot of footprints, but a clean, narrow patch had been swept to make a corridor to the bottom of the staircase.

  He tried the light switch again but with no luck. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons drifted down to him. Tom took the stairs carefully, his steps creating dark, musty clouds around his feet.

  “You’re late. I’ve already done about half of it.” John turned from the bed where he’d been folding some of Willie’s sweaters. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure, I … I’m sorry,” Tom said awkwardly. John kept looking at him, his hands resting on the pile of sweaters. What does he want me to say? “You would know best where everything should go, anyway.”

  John nodded, as if that had been the correct answer. “I appreciate that. I guess I do know who Willie would have liked to have his things, and what should go to Goodwill. I loved Willie, do you know that? I really did.”

  “I know. I loved him, too.”

  John sighed, and continued folding the sweaters. “But it isn’t the same, is it?”

  Tom didn’t reply. John sent him for boxes and he got them. Together they packed the boxes—John told Tom whose name to put on each box. Together they dismantled the bookcases and sorted through the books. John thought Tom should take a number of those for himself, and Tom accepted the idea. Now and then Tom would be aware of an increased amount of dust in the air—clouds of it would drift past the yellowed window panes. He thought John didn’t notice until he stopped once and said, “We’ll have to hurry. In a couple of days they won’t be letting anyone back into the place. And the floorboards are creaking more than they used to. I think that’s probably not a good sign.”