I called again. No answer, so I headed outside, into the courtyard—perhaps Charles was in the master bedroom on the other side of the house. I made it about halfway before I heard the snapping of a branch behind me. A tingling shot up my spine. I wanted to turn—so badly—but I didn’t look, not even once. Instead, I called out: “Who is it?” Nothing answered. Still, it was there. Right behind me. I could feel its presence.
Snap, snap. More sounds. Over there . . . I allowed myself to look out of the corner of my eye. There were others on my left and right. How many? I’ll never know for sure, for I quickly raced to the door on the other side of the yard, ran inside, and slammed it shut behind me. The force of the door slamming spun me around, and I found myself face-to-face through the glass window with something hideous.
Smashed together, it seemed, dozens of faces, stacked atop one another. Maybe hundreds, nearly identical. And all of them were all plastered onto a single conk nearly seven feet tall, so the individual faces, collectively, composed the features—eyes, ears, nose—of the master face. The main face had the haircut of a distinguished gentleman—its neck ending at the collar of an expensive suit and tie.
The tongues of the hundreds of faces wiggled and writhed and licked up and down and slurped at their crusty lips. Each miniature head rolled its eyes around loosely in their sockets, focusing on nothing—but I got the sense they saw everything.
Then, the giant head comprising all the faces began to rise. It was connected to an immense body, a giant, a hundred feet tall, and it stood, stood up, rose into a—
“Alex, close your eyes!” Charles’s voice rang out from somewhere, rising above the sounds of slithering from the faces. I tore my gaze from the window and threw my hands over my face.
After several moments the scratching at the window ceased. The face—the faces—were gone. I slowly looked up, my eyes bleary from pressing so hard against my palms.
When I found Charles in the master bedroom I ranted for three minutes, gathering up his things for him, throwing them in his suitcase, all the while telling him how we would go down into the wine cellar, ready ourselves with our father’s guns, say our prayers, then head back up to the book room and wait with our backs against the sturdy bookcases. There we would stay until they came close. We’d stare at the spirits—both of us, very intently—and bring them into the physical world before blowing them to smithereens—
I stopped. “Charles?” He’d been silent the whole time. “Charles, have you heard a word I’ve said?”
Charles sat in the shadows of the room, deep in the cushions of Father’s favorite armchair. “Yes,” he answered softly. “I hear you.” I told him to get up. He didn’t. “I found Maggie” was all he said.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“In the wine cellar.”
“What is she doing down there?”
“She isn’t well.”
“Is she sick? Hurt?”
“Yes, very sick. I’ve locked her in. We can never let her out. We can never set foot in the wine cellar ever again.”
“But have you heard me, Charles? We need to—!”
“Yes, I heard you,” he interrupted, despondent. “But guns won’t do much good now.”
I was about to ask why not, when a flash of moonlight poked between the giant curtains in our father’s old room, illuminating Charles’s face for just a moment. Bandages covered the top half of his head.
“After you left, I searched the house for hours,” he said. “I kept hearing Maggie whining and screaming, so I lit a torch and went over the grounds of the estate. I saw nothing. I made a circle in the courtyard, then went through all the rooms. Then I caught a glimpse of a body stretched thin against the wall in the cellar, like it was trying to hide itself. It was Maggie! She came at me, clawing and biting—and I ran. I locked her in.”
He slowly unraveled the gauze strips around his head. “I panicked. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing my dear Maggie again like that. The rules were simple, brother. Never stare. Never stare at who goes there.”
Charles removed the bandages. “All I could think to do was to avoid looking at her anymore. It couldn’t be real, it just couldn’t. This is all my fault, Alex. Your plan—your plan is ruined.”
“Charles, your eyes—“
“Yes.” Charles whimpered. Flame-shadow danced inside his almost empty eye sockets. “I’ve blinded myself. I see no more.”
Chapter Eighteen
I sat for several minutes, saying nothing. Surely there had to be a way around this. First there was a blank, stupid feeling. Then, anger. Both phases passed.
“If you can’t see them, then maybe they can’t hurt you anymore.” I formulated a plan. “Maybe we only need to kill my spirits. And, if I am able to see your spirits, I will draw them out on my own, like the others, and send them back to Hell myself.”
Charles seemed nearly comatose. He’d poked out his eyes with a kitchen knife, and was now wrapping himself again in gauze. I gave him a few minutes to collect himself, sat next to him with an arm around his shoulder.
When he said he was ready, I helped Charles to the bathroom so we could rinse off and prepare ourselves, though I alone would have to guide us down into the wine cellar and face whatever Maggie had become—without looking at any spirits on the way down.
I grabbed an old shaving mirror from my father’s cabinet and with some strong glue fastened it to a broken shower pole. This way we could walk backward through the house, and I could see where we were headed without having to look directly behind me. I didn’t want to chance accidentally looking at the spirits and bringing them closer to us before we had our gats. Perhaps this plan, fit for Medusa, would work.
We left the bathroom, Charles clutching my shirt. In my right hand I held our torch; in my left, the mirror. I held the mirror out in front of me and bounced the torchlight off it so I could see behind me.
We shuffled down the long hallway. Charles kept his face on a swivel, sending out invisible beacons like some kind of bat. My eyes never left the small 5″×6″ mirror.
We walked slowly. Ten steps. Eleven. Twelve. Charles shook with the force of earthquakes as we approached a dark shape in the hallway. It was the woman in the red dress I’d followed previously into the bar; though it was dark and cloudy in the mirror her eyes still shone. They were pure white. Her hair fell in wet spaghetti strands, as if waterlogged for months. The mirror worked. I could look freely without her reaching out and grabbing me. We both turned sideways to avoid bumping her, and as we passed, her image faded from view.
Other images slipped past the mirror as we went around the corner. Something like a lumpy clown blocked us from the door to the courtyard, so we walked to the next glass door, which was free, and backpedaled outside.
I stopped cold. A myriad of shadowy ghouls awaited us in the courtyard. “Alex?” croaked Charles. “How many are there . . .?”
“Dozens,” I whispered, gazing into my mirror, wrapping his arm in mine. “Stay close to me . . .”
We began our slow shuffle backward. Using the mirror as my guide, I found a clear path through the formation of spirits. Over the weeds, under the rotting fruit tree, to the door that links to the cellar, maybe 150 feet away. Soon we’d be at the guns.
The emotions that flooded me, the faces I confronted in that mirror, are difficult to parse out, but I’ll do my best to tell you about them. We nearly tripped over a fat, morbid goon, not more than two feet tall, shaped like a crab, whose head perched upon a 200-pound torso. He skittered along on imperceptible legs like a shelled sea creature dropped without warning onto land. An intense feeling of shame lit me up inside; I “saw” this spirit as a young woman I’d met in Paris in my twenties during a three-month stay. We fell in love (rather, she with me), and upon making plans to wed in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I promptly left the country on an epic bender, one day before our marriage at the church. Young and silly, that’s how I justified it. Why she’d taken this form now,
I have no clue.
Slowly we wound around the shadow people, the near-freezing sea wind emptying Charles and me of warmth. Still, we pressed on, and soon came to the cellar door at the other side of the courtyard.
Outside the heavy wooden door to the cellar we settled for a moment, mentally preparing ourselves. “I don’t want her to suffer,” he said. “Do it quickly.”
I waited a moment before pushing the door open.
Chapter Nineteen
The staircase down to the cellar was short and narrow. We went one at a time, me in front clutching my small knife and mirror. Charles came behind me, gripping my forearm and digging into my marrow.
The ancient wood groaned beneath our feet. How long since someone had been down here? Ten years, perhaps? Though not bright enough to light the entire room, our torch cut through the dark enough to fashion us a kind of cocoon of orange and yellow.
We reached the bottom of the stairs. To our front, some ten feet ahead, sat the wine racks. In their prime they had held a hundred bottles of wine, champagne, and brandy—now they sat empty. The cellar stretched fifty feet to our left and right. Old furniture and decorations draped in sheets were strewn about to our right, maybe twenty feet away, creating white waves.
“Maggie?” Charles whipped his head around again to get an auditory read on something somewhere. I, however, kept still. I had the feeling of being watched. Emptiness crowded me. I listened, heard nothing. If we fell backward, we’d fall forever. Who would catch us?
“Charles,” I whispered. “The guns. Where are they?”
“Against the wall,” he said, motioning with his head to the right side of the room, between the dozens of sheet-draped pieces of furniture standing on the floor that had been rotting in the saltwater air for decades. “In the chest.”
We had no choice but to move through the white field. We started for the guns. “Brother!” Charles squeezed my arm. We stopped. He whispered softly, his voice carrying on the stillness. “Hear that?”
I listened, told him I heard nothing—
“Ssh!” Nothing. Then . . .
Low, almost imperceptible, just louder than an ant on a pillow . . . something.
I strained, listened again. In the silence I could hear the hairs on my ear waggle on a nonexistent breeze. I could hear a mouse scampering on a pin cushion before I could hear—
Wait. A breath, somewhere. Soft. Ladylike.
My brother pointed ahead, his arm shaking, past the rows of white, past the horizon of our sight, into nothing, into everything. We waited. Ten seconds. A minute. Two minutes. Five. The breathing dissipated, disappeared into the background. Finally, I gave my brother’s hand two short squeezes. Move forward, they said. Move on.
The white sails whispered at us, trying to hitch a ride, leave their lonely outposts. But we couldn’t take them with us. We drew closer to the back of the basement, where the guns lay.
Ten feet, nine feet, eight. . .
Fire shadow danced off everything.
Six, five, four. . .
The strained breathing returned then. I couldn’t place its location; it seemed to be all around us. I readied my fists and my knife. Charles sucked in a deep breath.
Three feet, two—
One.
We reached the chest. I whipped around, protecting our backsides, expecting some spirit, or a deranged Maggie. But there was nothing.
“Quickly,” I said, throwing open the chest. We’d found the heaters. Several revolvers, a shotgun, a rifle, all wrapped in blankets. Under them was a small removable drawer. Beneath that were the shells. I loaded the shotgun and shoved the rest of the shells in my pocket. Next came the .38 caliber slugs, which I loaded, and I tucked the revolver into the waistband of my pants.
I looked at Charles. His head wandered around on its own, snotty, sniveling, sensing his beloved. I gave him a loaded revolver to hold; I couldn’t carry everything. When I looked back to the gun chest, two hands sprang from the infinite darkness within it and grabbed my shoulders.
Maggie pulled herself out of the chest. Her eyelids had been removed or had simply been sucked back inside her head, for her eyes protruded like a spider’s. Cracked, peeling skin surrounded a lipless mouth and crooked teeth. She leaned in to swallow my head.
I screamed and fired the shotgun wildly. I must have hit her, because Maggie’s hands flew from my shoulders and she disappeared into the chest. She fell far, as if the interior were a hundred feet deep. It simply swallowed her up. I turned to run but tripped over Charles, and my head split open on the floor.
Wiping the blood from my eyes, I looked up to find fire vanquishing the white sheets. I had dropped the torch when I fell and now the flames quickly ate them up. I leapt up, grabbed Charles by the arm, and dragged him through the fire, to the steps, where—
We were blocked by a body bathed in flame and shadow.
Maggie stood in front of the stairs, her cheeks hanging like bags of pus. In the firelight I could see her decaying hairline covered in maggots. Her whole body swayed back and forth, skinny and scrawny, her nakedness peeking out from behind what remained of her ragged clothes. She looked like she’d been in the cellar for decades.
“Maggie, darling?” Charles’s whimpering voice called out behind me. To my horror he stepped in front of me and offered Maggie an outstretched hand. She regarded him as a cat does its owner, as a bird contemplates seedlings from a human hand. A tear formed in her droopy eye, then rolled down her face and caught in her rotting trap.
Charles moved forward, arms outstretched, and embraced her. As the last flames of the white sheet died out, I watched Charles lead Maggie farther into the darkness, behind the stairs.
For a moment all was quiet. Then there was a scream. Sounds of scrabbling. Ripping clothes. Yelling, snarling. Then—
A shot rang out.
I pointed my rifle into the dark and stutter-stepped forward, ready to put a shell into Maggie. But it was Charles who emerged. Beaten and bloody, he collapsed into me, his arm gripping his stomach.
His insides were sliding out. She’d clawed right through his belly, into his guts, where all indecent women try to kill their men. He’d clipped her with his revolver, but she’d gotten him good too. I wasted no time taking Charles up the stairs, then triple-locked and barricaded the cellar door from the outside.
Even then, I could still hear Maggie giggling.
Chapter Twenty
“Father’s armchair . . . set me down . . .” Charles seemed to have deflated by the time we returned to the library. One arm slung over my shoulder, he was barely able to walk as his legs had folded beneath him; I dragged them on the heavy wooden floor. He drooped like a wilted flower, blood and bile running down his legs and leaving a clear trail from the cellar to here. “Alex,” he whispered as I placed him in his chair. “Open the cabinet door . . . next to the bed . . .”
I put my hand deep inside the cabinet and felt around, my hand leaving a bright red streak on the door’s ivory handle. But I found what he wanted. I looked back at him, disturbed. He nodded at me. “Bring it here . . .”
The label on the bottle read “Macallan - 1840.” My father’s best whiskey. An expensive bottle. Maybe the finest we ever had. The liquid inside swirled like an ocean whirlpool, promising to carry us on its current far, far away from here.
Charles broke the seal, and the smell of fire roared from the bottle. My face grew numb. All memory of the last few days left me.
He put his nose to the bottle and inhaled deeply. His eyes rolled back a little. His exhalation was one of immense satisfaction, and I doubt he even noticed the fresh blood oozing from his side.
Then, miraculously, he corked the bottle and threw it aside. I watched as it thudded on the heavy carpet floor but didn’t break.
Sensing my alarm for the bottle’s safety, Charles smiled weakly and said, “Dear brother, wouldn’t it be just poetic to forget this sobriety for one last drink? Well, I won’t do it. For even with the spirits, I
have won. I will die a sober man. Life has taken me, yes, but life takes us all. Today I have faced and destroyed that which had enslaved me for so many years . . . I’ll die, but I’ll die free.”
He grabbed both my hands. “Please believe me, that in those years of drunkenness I didn’t know what I was doing. You should know that by now. If I could make it up to you, I would.”
I sat beside him, gripping his bloody hands, while he died. “Finish what you started,” he said. “Face them, and go live a happy life. Do it for me. Fill ’em with lead.” After a few minutes, his breathing quieted and he shut his eyes.
I remembered our first fights; our plays in the tree house; when he ran away from home; when he returned; our first drink together; the family reunions he’d missed; the sheepish, melancholy look he had when he came seeking forgiveness for liquidating accounts. I’d often yell, demand he tell me where he’d gone, why he’d missed one appointment or another. I remembered how he’d look at me with that bewildered expression I hated so much. I remembered the fighting, the hate in my heart for a drunk like him.
I know now that I’ve never known my brother, not my real brother anyway. I think the spirits have always possessed him, long before he began drinking heavily. I wonder what it would have been like to know him. Would I have turned out different? No doubt. Oh, what could have been . . .
Chapter Twenty-One
The beasts, I hear them now. They pace back and forth just outside the door, while I load my guns. They’re waiting. Why don’t they just burst in? I like to think they sense my plan and are afraid. Maybe they don’t want me after all.
But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Who are . . . they? The rabbit man, the crumb eater, the crab scuttler, the face with a hundred faces?
Who goes there?
What Goes On In The Walls At Night: Thirteen tales of disgust and delight Page 17
