What Goes On In The Walls At Night: Thirteen tales of disgust and delight

by Andrew Schrader

  Eventually the sun rose, and I hung up the phone.

  In Martin’s room I found a notebook documenting the last few weeks. He’d indeed found that eating parts of the human helped recreate his physical form. Eating them whole seemed to help him visualize and think positively. Hence, the reason he only had to eat a single eye to gain its form. Obviously, he couldn’t eat an entire arm, leg, or groin in one bite. Those he cut up.

  Most fingers, he found, however, can be chewed whole, if not swallowed in two bites. So can teeth, fingernails, ears, or other body parts. He wrote that he liked the knuckles on the maid’s left hand, so he ate those. When I returned to the freezer to compare the third knuckle on his left hand to the rest of his knuckles, I found it daintier and more feminine than its hairy, brutish companions . . .

  You might remember the profile the media did on Martin Nicholls after his football career. One network did a whole breakdown of his property, almost to the yard. It’s big news for the locals when a famous person settles in a smaller, nondescript location like outer Wausau, since it tends to raise house prices, and may help with tourism.

  As I said previously, a small footnote in that broadcast was that Martin owned an old bird sanctuary. As I may have said, too, there are many thousands of birds in this area: hawks, terns, red-necked phalaropes, long-tailed jaegers, snipes, orioles, wrens, and partridges. One of the previous owners had erected an expansive net that stretched three hundred feet long and approximately one hundred feet wide, similar to one you’d find in a zoo.

  I fixed the holes in the netting, meticulously examining each one to safeguard against unauthorized exits. Then I gathered the birds.

  With some of the many thousands of dollars I found under Martin’s bed I bought dozens, if not hundreds, of each breed of bird I desired, flown in from all over the world—parrots, macaws, lovebirds, canaries, cardinals, double-crested cormorants, owls, doves, robins, bluebirds, sparrows, finches and more.

  I mingled these with the birds I collected from this native area, and soon the mesh enclosure was full of God-knows-how-many squawks and squeaks and chirps and gibbers and whistles and bird songs, day and night.

  Over the next few months I took time off from my real job, to focus primarily on restoring the bird sanctuary. The airline was good enough to let me scale back to domestic flights only; on off-nights I stayed at Martin’s house.

  Ditching the cars that sat collecting dust in the front yard took some effort. Since I couldn’t risk enlisting anyone’s help, I had to drive each car to Lake Michigan and take the bus back to Wausau. I couldn’t afford to leave a paper trail, so I financed my trips with Martin’s cash.

  The bodies I kept in the freezer. I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Fortunately, this whole process has gone by fairly quickly, and in the last few months not a single person has come calling about the maid, the doctor, or the trainer.

  No one has disrupted my eating.

  The first thing I’ll say about that—the eating—is that swallowing the birds whole is too damn difficult. They really are bigger than you think. What you’ve got to do, in my experience, is focus only on the parts of the bird you like, while you chew and swallow. Being untrained, it took me many hundreds of birds to get the right effect.

  Lately I’ve focused on the beak, and have crafted just the right size and weight with which to break nuts and seeds on my long flight south for the winter.

  About a month ago, my toes were replaced with the talons of a great horned owl. I then sprouted my first feather; now I am in full bloom. Two weeks ago I lost my human eyes and gained the eyes of a red-tailed hawk. I’ve replaced most of my parts, but left my fingers, since I’ve found them useful as both bird and man.

  Just this morning I lifted myself off the ground with the beating and flapping of my new wings. Afterwards I peeled back the mesh door of the sanctuary to let the rest of my birds out, and then came inside one last time to burn the last of Martin’s notes on the stove.

  In just a few minutes I will be long gone, above the airplanes, swimming in the clouds with no steel or metal confining me, as is my birthright. Don’t bother scanning the skies; you won’t find me.

  Adios.

  Bradbury Walks At Midnight

  Elliot pulled his baseball cap farther down his face, hiding his scowl from the group of giggling teenage girls he passed in the street. His face went hot and red; he was in no mood to engage with anyone. When he smiled, it hurt; when he caught himself laughing, it sometimes felt so foreign and alien and uneven that at first it surprised him, then embarrassed him, and, hating both surprises and embarrassment, he’d go right back to scowling.

  So the girls passed and he stared at his feet and shuffled on, blotting out the world around him as best he could, his mind rolling in tsunami waves that drowned out all happy and coherent thoughts and left him with only the low tide of dismal thinking.

  He’d had it with life, at the young age of thirty-one, cornered by frustration and disappointment. A double bind of the worst kind. His thoughts closed in on him like jungle cannibals clutching sharpened spears. His mind was out to get him, and tonight it was having its way.

  The air was crisp and sweet with the oncoming fall—yet he wished for spring. The birds sang for fun and for the end of the hot summer, but he moped in silence. A thick wool of self-loathing clogged his ears, nose, eyes—everything.

  It was in this sorry state that he crossed the tranquil Devon Road in his hometown and trudged down the paved path under the overhanging oak trees to Golden Hills Park. He couldn’t hear the chirping crickets, the scurrying rodents, the wonderful night noises in the thickets on either side. He glanced at the sign that read “Hours - 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.”—and didn’t care. It was midnight now, and no one would be there to enforce the rules anyway.

  He continued down the meandering path, blind to everything, building an armor of misery. I’m angry and mean, and I hate everything (in reality, he was a pussycat); I’ll fight ‘em (he’d never fought anyone in his life); I’ll shoot ‘em (never fired a gun); everyone hates me (won the high school superlative for best personality). I’m —

  “Oh, shut up, your thinking is ruining the view.” A voice from a smiling mouth rang out of the darkness of the park.

  Elliot froze. He scanned the playground and the small open field behind it and saw a figure on a bench dimly lit by the single ethereal light on the opposite side of the park.

  The man wore a suit and tie, had coke-bottle glasses and wild gray-white hair, and was grinning and staring up at the stars.

  “Isn’t it marvelous?” the man asked, head thrown back, gazing at the cosmos. “I never tire of it. The stars and planets and lights hitting us from places we can’t see or imagine. How much escapes our senses? Think about it—all around you are universes big and small: tiny worlds with life and magic—yes, magic! Somewhere on the face of the cosmic clock an inanimate object decided to become something else—and then it got up and walked. Fish leapt from the water, onto land, into the trees some millions and millions of years ago—just because . . . well, you know why, don’t you?”

  Elliot felt compelled to say something to this man with sparkling eyes, this charming lunatic who held the supposed secrets of the universe, and though he found it difficult and choking to do so, he croaked a “No.”

  “Of course you do. Everyone knows why, even though the reasons are smothered by oppressive thoughts and the opinions of others. Everybody has the choice to become like the fish and sprout legs, even if their own immense journeys seem cloudy and uninviting.” His eyes twinkled. “Yours is happening now.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes—you, me, everyone! We’re all just like those fish waiting to decide to become something else and leap from the water onto land. But in order to make the jump, you have to first be convinced—either by yourself or by watching others who have gone before—that such a jump is possible. And if it’s not possible, you jump anyway, if your true place is on land. Do yo
u understand, my boy?”

  Elliot had to admit he didn’t.

  Ray Bradbury held up a hand as if to say, “Wait, wait, I’ll show you,” and pointed up at the stars. “Right now our government is stupidly delaying our leap into the unknown; money for our destiny in the stars is wasted on war. We’ve lost a sense of wonder and plucked the magic from our lives like the last petal of a rose.”

  “Why do we do that, do you think?” Elliot gulped and shrank at his own voice, which Ray noticed and smiled at but stayed silent about.

  “I don’t know, my dear boy,” he said, sighing. “But you’ve got to exorcise the cynicism from your life. You must. Life is simply too wonderful for all that.”

  Then Ray looked around stealthily and smiled and lowered his voice as if to let Elliot in on a secret. “Do you know why we’re here? The . . . meaning of life?”

  Elliot shook his head.

  “I’ll tell you. But I want you to listen carefully. You must clear all the leaves and dead branches from the forest floor of your mind—and then banish them in a flash of lightning fire. Whoosh—just like that!

  “The reason you are here is to witness the miraculous. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no other reason to be alive, except to look at that tree, at the oceans, at your neighbor, and realize to the best of your ability that life is full of wonder. People die, people live, people change, and even though you are unhappy, there is no excuse for living without joy. Life is indeed a miracle and you are here to witness it.”

  Ray leaned back and grinned. “That’s the secret of life, huh? The answer to the question, ‘Why are we here?’ To live in the sunlight of the wonder-full, and to preach—yes, preach!—the message to everyone around you, so that they can believe in and make for themselves the leap from ocean to land, from the Earth to the stars, from fear to love. For they are miraculous, and so are you.”

  He put his hand on Elliot’s shoulder, which had grown wet. “You’re okay,” he said, smiling gently. “You’re doing just fine in life.”

  And he knew this was all Elliot needed to hear, and after a moment he pulled the young man tighter in next to him and pointed with his other hand somewhere up into the heavens. “Now, you see that set of four stars up there? Those make up the constellation Cassiopeia . . .”

  And the two talked until dawn, watching the miraculous unfold above them.

  The Developer

  Thunk! The truck bounced, jolted, woke the kid. Little Charlie peered through sleep-baked eyes at the road and the dead, pale green grasses that stretched to their left and right. “Are we almost there?”

  His father, Alan, bounced once with the truck, took the toothpick out of his mouth, and set it in the cup holder. “Be there soon. Probably another fifteen minutes.”

  Silence. After a moment, a shimmery gold peeked through the clouds. “Dad, what’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That yellow stuff.”

  “Oh, that. That’s the sun. You remember the sun, the report we saw last week saying it would be out? There was a sighting somewhere on the East Coast.”

  Charlie wrinkled his forehead. “But what is it?”

  “It’s a big ball of gas that used to help us grow food. It would shine down on us, all over the world, and that’s what caused plants to come out of the ground.”

  “Why doesn’t it come out all the time?”

  “It does, but, well, we had to block it out. It was dangerous. Besides, we don’t need it anymore.”

  The truck bumped again. Charlie watched the yellow thing called the sun for a while, the dark gray sky having dulled it to a drab red so he could look straight into it without blinking. After some time, he turned his attention back to the road, hoping for cars but knowing they wouldn’t see many—if any at all.

  Charlie decided his father was lucky, since he still had a truck. A big one, a hauler. Only one of his community school friends’ parents drove a car—and then only on special occasions.

  Charlie watched his dad concentrating on the road, gently turning here and there to avoid a broken-down shell of a vehicle or a busted tire or a pothole, and smiled at the thought of returning home to his friends with the trip of a lifetime. They were going to see The Developer—the machine they’d only seen pictures of, the thing so massive it had to be built in the middle of the desert in southern California.

  Charlie turned and slid open the little hatch that separated the cab of the truck from the forty-foot cargo hold. Inside he saw the dozens of dead cats and dogs—and live ostriches, tied down. The ostriches they’d bred at the house, all eight of them.

  They’d put the dead animals in crates and filled the empty spaces with mothballs and other agents to prevent decay and keep away the rats. And then there were the wood, old metal parts, furniture, and other Resources stacked atop and around each other to maximize space. They’d filled the thing to the brim—and then some. But the animals were the big prize, according to Alan.

  “Dad, are the ostriches going to sleep forever?”

  Alan absentmindedly picked at his teeth, then found the discarded toothpick and put it back to work. “Yep.”

  “Will they feel anything?”

  “Nope. Not a thing.”

  The kid was silent.

  “What’s the matter?” Alan asked. “Aren’t you excited to see The Developer?”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “Okay then.”

  They went on in silence, rolling with the thump-thump-thump of the tires and losing themselves in the meditative quality of the drive and the road.

  After some time, they passed a few large vehicles, and Charlie nearly leapt out of his seat in excitement, one of his overall buckles coming undone and hanging limply down his chest.

  “Look at that one there,” Alan said, pointing at a behemoth flatbed trailer maybe fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide. “Horses!” And there were dozens and dozens of them, all stuffed into the back of the trailer, surrounded by metal gates about four feet tall with wire fencing above.

  “Wow!” Charlie looked back at his dad, wide-eyed. “There’s gotta be fifty of them!”

  “More.”

  “Really?” Charlie screamed. “How many more?”

  “Well, I’ve read those haulers can carry one hundred Whole Horse Resources.”

  “How much money will they get for them?” Charlie asked, bouncing up and down and eyes full of fire.

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . quite a lot, though. Thousands and thousands, for sure.”

  “Are we going to make that much money?”

  Alan grinned. “Not that much. But plenty.”

  The horses, exposed to the open air, were bucking around, kicking each other, kicking their enclosures, at nothing and everything. Several were up on their hind legs, trying to jump, trying to—

  “Are they trying to get out?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh, no,” Alan said. “They love being in there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they’re Resources, silly. And Resources don’t know about, or think about, or feel anything. You know that.”

  Charlie furrowed his brow. What his father said made sense on some level, but something didn’t add up.

  Then—

  “Oh, Dad, look!” Charlie leapt up and pointed at the back of the trailer. A large, brown horse with white legs and a long mane was standing with her front legs over the metal barrier; she was pushing one line of barbed wire down, forcing half her body over the side of the trailer and the open highway. “What’s it doing?”

  The horse turned her head and, with one large, frightened eye, peered at Charlie, made eye contact for a moment, and turned back to the road. Her back legs tightened and extended, and she sprang forward, launching herself over the railing, onto the highway.

  Her neck hit first, whipping her head down onto the pavement. Her neck snapped instantly, spraying blood and brain across the asphalt. The truck’s back tire ran over the body. The tr
uck bounced but kept going.

  Charlie screamed and jumped up and down in his seat, and begged his father to stop and see if the horse was all right. Alan refused, and calmly tried to explain that the horse was dead and that was that and that there was nothing left to do.

  After several minutes of sobbing and covering his eyes, Charlie spoke. “They’re all going to die, aren’t they? All those horses?”

  The father spoke slowly, cautiously. “Die? No, of course not. Don’t be silly.”

  “Then what’s going to happen to them?”

  “I told you. They’re Resources. They’re going to be developed. The government says being developed is always a painless process. Besides, they’re only here so you and I and everybody else can use them. So it’s okay.”

  Alan waited a moment, then patted his boy on the shoulder until the sniveling stopped, and pointed through the front window. “Look,” he said. “We’re here.”

  Charlie sniffled and peered through the windshield. As they slowed down to take the off-ramp from Highway 10, toward the north shore of the Salton Sea, Charlie saw broken-down vehicles surrounded by men and women with desert-cracked skin. Some held signs saying things like “Not lazy, just hungry” or “Mother of four, no work.” Charlie felt sorry for them, but he was quickly reminded of his father’s take on “those people”—the people who refused to pull themselves up on their own. They were all beggars, here to live in the choking exhaust and pollution for the chance at a few bucks, and to eat another day.

  They passed through a checkpoint made of metal and X-ray machines, between the giant sides of the gate, and there the people stopped. The winds picked up again and the smoke swirled behind their massive truck; and if you were looking back, you would quickly lose the beggars behind the billowing dirt and grime and the closing gate.

  Three hours later, Alan and Charlie were still several miles from The Developer. But Charlie thought nothing of the time; the other trucks around him had sucked his attention.