by Hart, Joe
The word depressing, he decided, described the facility best, as he strode toward the double doors that were two dark outlines in the shadow of the structure. The building was a rough rectangle, and no one had made an effort over the years to dress up the outside walls, to make them seem more inviting, so stained concrete met his eyes as he examined its two stories. The windows were onyx squares that, upon closer inspection, revealed wire interweaving within their panes. There were a few smaller outbuildings set off to each side, not big enough to be living areas and not small enough to be storage sheds.
The door swung open easily as he stepped through an archway and into a small waiting room that ended in a counter protected by Plexiglas from the waist up. A mouse-like woman in a pale blue uniform sat behind the glass tapping at a keyboard. She looked away from her computer screen as Lance approached, and eyed him warily.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yes, I wondered if an Annette Metzger still lived here.” Lance scrutinized his choice of words. Lived seemed a bit too friendly in the current atmosphere. Existed would have been a better choice. The nurse’s eyes narrowed, and he began to wonder if she would answer.
After a few seconds, she said, “Family or friend?”
Lance considered it for a moment before he replied. “Family.”
The nurse appraised him once more and then motioned with one hand toward a swinging door next to the desk. Lance walked through the door, which opened up into a wide hallway lined with speckled white tiles that were surprisingly clean under the harsh light of the fluorescents. Each side of the hall held five doors, and he could see the far end branched off in a T. A door directly to his right opened and a middle-aged nurse with piles of curly gray hair stepped out of what he assumed was the back of the office he had been looking into.
“Hello, here to see one of the residents?” she said, stepping toward him, her voice considerably higher when compared to her sturdy build.
“Yes, Annette Metzger,” he said.
“Ah, I see. Are you a relative?”
“Yes, I, uh …” Lance faltered. Uttering what he meant to say took actual concentration. “I’m her grandson.”
The nurse’s eyes couldn’t have gotten larger if they were pried open. Lance imagined her bringing her hands to the sides of her face and screaming as she backed away, but instead, she only raised her gray eyebrows and blinked a few times.
“Well, this is a surprise. She’s never had a visitor since I’ve been here. We’ll see if you can get her to talk.”
Without another word, the nurse spun on a flat-heeled shoe and marched away from him, down to the end of the hall. He followed, now noticing the smell that had eluded him near the front desk. Urine and something muskier hung in the air, and as he passed each room, he couldn’t help but peer into them. Several of the rooms were empty, but as they neared the corner and the nurse hung a hard right, he spotted an old man sitting at the window that looked out onto a courtyard, which sat secluded in the center of the building. Drool trailed in a slim line from the man’s chin to his lap, and when Lance looked down he saw that the man’s pants were soaked—whether from the saliva or another bodily fluid, he couldn’t tell.
Lance quit looking into the rooms and pulled up short behind the wide backside of the nurse, who stood awaiting an elevator at the end of the short T. The doors slid open and they both stepped inside. The nurse hit the backlit number 2 and crossed her hands over her belly as the car hummed around them.
“Just want to warn you, she’s not responsive. I’ve never heard her say a word. I’ve got to stay just outside the door, with it open—facility rules.”
Lance frowned. “Why’s that?” The elevator yawned open to another hallway, this one running straight away from them without obstruction.
The nurse stepped out. “The second floor houses more-aggressive residents.”
Lance peered past the nurse just as a gaunt man shuffled out into the hallway from a room, a uniformed woman following behind him. When Lance looked at them, he didn’t see a caring protector watching over her ward. Instead, he saw the blank expression of someone taking a dog for a walk on the nurse’s face. The man seemed to be running from something only he could see but wasn’t able to make his legs cooperate. His feet slid along the ground, hindering his progress. His vacant eyes bulged as he glanced over his shoulder and a terrified look was etched across his face.
“Mr. Metzger?”
Lance turned and realized that the nurse had continued on while he was transfixed. “Sorry,” he said, catching up with her a few doorways down.
The nurse stood by a thick wooden door with a small rectangular window set in its middle. A tangled mass of keys hung from one pudgy hand.
As he watched her extricate the right key from the group, Lance asked, “What exactly did she do to get locked up here, away from the other residents?”
The nurse grunted. “We had an orderly get bitten once—she doesn’t like men much.”
The door swung inward with a thrust of her hand, and Lance stepped past her and into the room. The living space crowded his senses. The walls were beige, which had most likely been selected to calm the patients, but instead looked lifeless and bland in the wan lighting. A lower-concentrated blend of the smell he had encountered on the floor below hung in the room. A bed, thin and carefully made, stood against one wall. A heavy desk sat below the only window in the room, which shone a dim gray from the clouds outside.
The light filtered onto the humped figure that sat at the desk, its back to the door. Lance studied the woman, her shoulders so rounded by time that they seemed like afterthoughts on her body. Her hair hung at her shoulders, a shade beyond white. The stick-like arms were shrouded in the folds of an overly large sweater that was an ugly color of olive. She made no movement when Lance stepped into the room, his footsteps overly loud in the close quarters.
“I’ll be just outside,” the nurse murmured as she sidestepped out of view.
Lance barely heard her as he approached his grandmother. Her face gradually became visible in the dim light. Her eyes didn’t register him as he neared, but instead they stared out the window—which was much too high to reach even by standing on the desk—at the marbled sky that rolled across its view.
He didn’t know how to begin. Each sentence that came to mind was inane or alien. He stood there, the knowledge that in the chair a few feet away rested his last living relative was not lost on him. The urge to turn and bolt out the door pushed at him, but he forced it away, grabbed a straight-backed chair, and sat.
His first impression of Annette being very old was incorrect. She was ancient. Her eyelids hung loose over sunken eyeballs that were glazed, a fog of years covering them. Her cheeks were lined with the loss of fat that had no doubt filled them full, and resembled two sails hanging limp on a windless day. Her toothless mouth was ajar, but surprisingly, no spittle dripped out of it.
“Hello, my name is Lance,” he began. “I know you don’t know me, but … I’m your grandson.” The words were out of his mouth before he had computed them. The emotion that clung to them stunned him. The longing for a family he had felt while growing up alone came rushing back to him in an instant. The feelings of envy and resentment at seeing other kids with parents and grandparents over the years surfaced from deep within him, and then submerged once again, pushed below by the questions that had drawn him here. “I wanted to ask you about some things. Would you like to talk with me?”
Annette didn’t move. Her eyes remained locked on the window. Lance frowned and leaned closer to the old woman, the smell of aged skin cloying the air around her.
“Annette, do you remember your house? The one at the lake? Do you remember what it looks like?” He thought he saw a movement beneath the sweater, a shiver. “Do you remember where you lived with my father? With your husband?” He stared at the side of her face, examining the lines there. Her jaw shifted, up a fraction of an inch and then back down. Lance blinked. H
ad she tried to say something?
He continued, hoping his voice would spur her on. “I moved there a little while ago. I didn’t know it was yours.”
The events that had transpired over the past weeks replayed in his head. In this dark room, they seemed all too real. Strange and otherworldly, but real. That was really why he had come to see this catatonic woman. To see if she could tell him why these things were happening to him. To give an explanation other than what his mind kept creeping toward like an open grave.
“I’ve been seeing things,” he started, his voice much lower than before. “Strange things in the house. I don’t know why, and I’m beginning to worry that nothing’s really there. That it’s just me. It’s always been me, and it’s something that’s broken inside my mind.”
His breath came in short bursts and he felt the clawings of anxiety. He sat back in his chair and tried to calm himself. The atmosphere of the building pressed upon him. He felt its institutional presence like a hand on his shoulder that waited to steer him into a room of his own in some quiet, dark corner. Maybe someday he’d see what the man in the hall saw. Maybe someday he would run from it too.
Lance tried to shake the thoughts and calm the panic that threatened to spew out of his chest. Annette still hadn’t moved, her arms resting at her sides, her face slack. What was he doing? Sitting here in a room with a woman he didn’t know, asking her questions about his own sanity when she hadn’t spoken a word since the day she had seen her husband’s gray matter sprayed across the floor of their home. Tell her the stain is still there, the voice intoned evilly.
Lance almost stood from his chair and left the room, knowing that his present location and his thoughts were terrible company, but something stopped him.
The surface of the desk before Annette held a folded piece of paper and a short nub of a pencil. He hadn’t noticed them before. Lance leaned forward, squinting in the dim light of the room. He realized that a crossword puzzle lay before his grandmother, its small boxes completely filled with letters. He reached out toward the puzzle, half expecting the old woman to lunge at his outstretched arm and tear at it like a snarling beast. Annette remained motionless as he slid the paper toward him with a soft scraping sound.
It took a moment for him to understand what had been written in the blank spaces of the puzzle. Most of the boxes overflowed with letters, their harsh outlines scratched deep into the page outside of the boundaries by the worn pencil. There were only two words on the page: WULF and RHINELANDER. Names, he corrected himself as he read them. The two names were repeated everywhere, scrawled by the unsteady hand of the woman beside him.
Lance looked at his grandmother, her hair floating weightless around her shrunken head, her eyes still staring at the growing storm outside. “Who are they?” he asked, his eyes locked on her face, looking for any signs that she’d heard him. “Can you tell me who they are?”
Nothing. No recognition. She was a husk, hollowed out by time and tragedy. The leavings of a mind all but eaten up, her last thoughts echoing out of an eroded memory and onto the page before her. And nothing that served as answers to his questions.
Lance stood from the chair, giving his grandmother one last look. He crossed the room and stepped into the hall, where the nurse stood staring at an alarming brown stain on the floor near one of the other doors.
“Thank you,” he said.
The bulky woman pulled the door shut and locked it. She grunted in reply and led the way back to the elevator. As the floor hummed its descent beneath them, Lance turned to the nurse.
“You don’t by any chance know anything about the names she wrote on the crossword in her room, do you?”
The nurse sighed through her nostrils. “I don’t know anything about Wulf. Sounds German to me. But Rhinelander rings a bell. He might have been a missing person quite a few years ago. Something like that, but I could be wrong.” Her shoulders rose in a dismissive shrug.
“Why a crossword?” Lance asked.
The nurse shrugged again. “She always gets one, has ever since I started here. Never seen her write on it, though. We bring her a fresh stub of pencil every now and then, and those words are just there, over and over. Heard the scratching coming from her room late one night when I was doing the rounds. It stopped when I got within a few feet of the door, though, and when I peeked in she was just staring at the wall, not moving.”
The image nearly coaxed a shudder from Lance, but he fought it back and followed the nurse out of the elevator as the doors opened onto the first floor.
“If she says anything, please let me know,” Lance said, handing the nurse a slip of paper with his name and number on it.
She took it and chuckled as she neared the office that she had emerged from earlier. “Oh, we will, don’t worry about that. That woman’s almost ninety years old, and the last thirty of it she’s spent writing those two names down. If she communicates anything other than that, we’ll give you a call.” Her laughter followed her into the office and died as the door swung shut behind her.
Lance frowned and walked out into the waiting area and through the exterior doors. The trees were beginning to bend more with the storm’s pressure, and he could almost taste rain in the air. He slid in behind the wheel of the Land Rover, and stared at the dark windows of the building. He wondered which one was his grandmother’s, and as he drove out of the parking lot, he imagined he could hear the sound of a pencil scratching on paper.
The grave sat just where John said it would. After walking to it, Lance wondered how he’d missed it before on his nightly treks through the property. The path that led off the main trail twisted only once, before rising onto a small bluff and opening into a clearing roughly the size of a car.
Lance stood at the opening’s mouth, looking at the short granite headstone. The words were barely visible in the gloom of the day, but he could still read them clearly enough.
“Erwin Metzger, 1920 to 1980. Father and husband. Rest in peace.” Lance’s voice sounded weak in the clearing amidst the rising wind and the constant beating of the waves on the shore behind him. When he turned his head to the left, he could actually see the house, which did nothing to comfort him.
He didn’t know why he had come here. Perhaps he hadn’t really believed John, and if the grave wasn’t here, he could refute everything the old man had said. He could wake up in the morning, refreshed and relieved by the fact that it had all been a joke.
He walked closer to the headstone. The ground had recently been cleared of sticks and leaves, the grass still very green over the plot. He realized then that John had been caretaking here also. Every time he came to tidy up the lawn and shrubbery he must have come to rake and prune this area also, each visit a reminder to the old man of his guilt and secrets. For some reason the thought seemed macabre to Lance, like Erwin had never truly released his hold on his employee. Lance supposed he hadn’t.
Lance felt his foot sink into the grass and stepped back onto the path. Images of a sinkhole opening up and him sliding down until he rested within a few inches of Erwin’s skeleton bloomed before him. He swallowed as a raindrop struck his nose, a cold tap of the storm’s fingertip. The sky had darkened further, and when he looked out across the lake, he saw angry waves rolling white peaks over and over as far as he could see.
As he made his way back to the house, more drops began to fall on him, which hurried his pace further, and he told himself it was the weather and not the lonely little clearing so close behind him that finally made him break into a run.
The house’s warmth did nothing to dispel the chill he felt as he shut the door and listened to its resounding echo. Just a tomb door closing, that’s all, the voice said, and Lance shook his head and went to the kitchen to find something for lunch.
Movement near the stairway caught his eye just as he turned the corner into the kitchen. He spun, his stomach dropping as he saw the bathroom door swing close above him on the landing. He sucked a breath in, wondering if he
’d seen what he thought he saw: fingers. Four of them, as white as a fish’s belly, sliding away into the darkness of the bathroom.
He waited, trying to hear any sounds above the throbbing in his eardrums. Did the door just click shut? Had he heard it or not? Had he really seen a hand shutting the door? The urge to leave became almost overwhelming. All he would have to do is walk back over to the entry, grab his keys from the shelf by the door, and leave this cursed place behind him. He could do it fast, so if something came out of the bathroom and ran down the stairs behind him, he would already be gone.
No. The word cleared all other panicked thoughts from his mind. He’d be running again. He’d always run, he realized. Ever since his father hit him the first time. He’d run from the pain, from his mother’s lack of protection, from the rage, from the fear of becoming something terrible, even from people who cared. Whatever was up there now would just be something new to run from, and he finally knew that no matter how fast he went, there would always be another reason to keep going.
By the time he came to himself, his foot had already found the first stair. Before his mind had time to protest, he lunged upward with a burst of speed. The familiar anger came back to him, but now it felt like an ally, not a conspirator, and he used it as he rounded the top railing and flung a well-placed kick at the bathroom door.
The door banged loudly off of the edge of the tub and rebounded, almost closing again. Lance blocked it open with a closed fist and flipped on the light with his other hand.
The room was empty.
He stepped farther in, pulling the door nearly closed and looking behind it. His eyes slid to the drawn shower curtain. Without hesitating, he ripped it open, revealing nothing but empty air and a solitary spider scurrying along the rim of the shower. His breath hissed out from between his teeth. He turned and looked at his reflection. His hair stuck up at odd angles from the wind outside and his fists were still clenched at his sides. He looked crazed.
