He loved Mark deeply. No question there. But they were such distinct beings he wondered how they’d stayed together for as long as they had. No denying he’d looked amazing at that Black Flag concert back in ‘86. Place stinking of sweaty punks, Mark the only other Black kid in a sea of shaved heads and ruddy skin. Took some brass balls to be openly queer in a scene that was all too quickly filling up with white trash and neo-Nazi dumbfucks. Even a bruiser like Jarrod had kept his attraction secret for months. Wasn’t like Mark was particularly big—average height, skinny teenager, more likely to be found sitting in the library reading Carl Sagan or Octavia Butler than flailing in a mosh pit. Even guys like Darby Crash had to hide being gay. White suburban punks weren’t exactly progressive minded.
Mark and Jarrod loved the scene and couldn’t deny the music’s allure. Or each other for that matter. At least in those days. Germ burns seemed so daring back then. Now Jarrod felt as if the scars were a humiliating reminder of his youthful romanticism.
He walked into the bathroom, slipped on a pair of shorts and a faded Bad Brains t-shirt. His hairline had slipped back even further. In just a few months. A subversive rage warmed his chest, ran up his throat like a hot filament. Might be time to shave the whole thing smooth. Least he could do was maintain his own looks in their relationship. Christ knew he hadn’t pulled through on the monetary front.
Fuck it, no use agonizing over a wasted college degree and a skill set that meant at 46 he was too young to retire, but too old to go back to college and work toward a relevant education. He wiped a musty smelling washcloth across his face. Money ain’t nothin’ but an excuse to engage in another prolonged shouting match. The anger perked up again and he breathed deep, shoved it down. Relax. Ain’t no reason to freak out over growin’ old much less over domestic squabbles. No reason at all.
He was concerned about their neighbors. Lucinde Rojas in #304 was borderline senile but seemed to do ok on her own. He wasn’t even sure what was wrong with the little girl Sophie in #302. Except that she was missing an arm. It struck him as odd she didn’t have a prosthetic. Figured kids that age were vain about their appearance, would try to hide something like that.
Now that he thought about it Ms. Rojas and Sophie were also amputees. He was discomfited by the notion that the apartment building had cultivated a disproportionate number of limbless tenants.
Limbless tenants.
He laughed at the thought.
Just a power outage. Rojas and Sophie were probably fine, but he felt obligated to make sure. The two had been friendly to him and Mark when they’d first moved in. The only ones in the building who’d been welcoming with iced tea, pastries, and gossip about the other tenants. The only ones who hadn’t muttered slurs under their breath when he passed by in the laundry room or when gathering the mail.
Jarrod maneuvered through the living room still cluttered with boxes from their relocation. He hoped renting a place in this run down apartment building was just a temporary setback until they got their shit together. Well, until he got his shit together.
He opened the sliding glass door that led out onto the balcony. The night was ominously quiet. Why were there no cars driving on Amaretto Street just a block away? He grabbed his keys and a flashlight then tiptoed to the bedroom to check on Mark one more time.
Mark had pulled the sheets up over his face. Just a thin arm exposed, dark and glassy like a carnelian sculpture. His proportions were odd, arms and legs drawn in towards the torso creating the illusion he inhabited less of the bed than usual. He was breathing softly, muttering something unintelligible.
Jarrod stepped out of the apartment into the hallway. The carpeted floor felt greasy under his bare foot. Pungent odors wafted at every step. The dark was like wading through syrupy ink; the fire doors normally held open by electromagnets had closed when the power had died. He felt an irrational need to keep his flashlight off, to avoid any attention. He ran his fingers along the flaking wall for guidance to Lucinde’s place.
The candlelight wriggling in the space below her door meant she might still be awake. Jarrod knocked several times but Lucinde didn’t answer.
Lucinde
was watching an old Benito Alazraki film on the Mexican classic movie channel when the power went out. The TV screen left a phantom image in the air. She was so startled by the impact of the emergency door closing she spilled her hot tea. She pressed her hand against her mouth. The moment her tongue touched flesh she heard a baby screaming.
She felt her way carefully to the kitchen counter for some candles and a box of matches, then slid forward incrementally, relying on the stability of her prosthetic foot, swiped her flesh and blood foot left to right for obstacles.
The candlelight softened the darkness but conjured jittery shadows. She hoped the child was with its parents; the thought of an innocent playing outside this late frightened her.
She glanced out the window. Something small and pale pranced in the middle of the street. The shape reminded her of a baptismal doll she had as a child.
Lucinde’s Doll is hand sewn by her aunt. Stitched satin patterns shaping smooth cloth into a little girl with plump cotton insides and abalone shell button eyes. The doll is a baptismal gift for little Lucinde. She falls asleep with it on her chest. Breath matches doll’s breath, both shudder into sleep simultaneously.
She’d passed the doll along to her daughter Maria after the baptism. Maria held onto it all through childhood, well into college. Her boyfriend Tony introduced her to heroin and violent mood swings and late night visits from the cops and trips to the emergency room. Lucinde had gained ownership of the doll again only after Tony punched Maria so hard a blood clot lodged in her brain. When she visited at the hospital she didn’t recognize her Maria— her daughter’s face had become the mask of an inert mannequin. Maria died 3-days later.
Shortly after the funeral Lucinde propped up the doll on the pillows of her daughter’s vacant bed. It was a futile gesture, maudlin even, but it was all she had left. Over the months it seemed as if the doll’s limbs filled out the sheets like a growing little girl. Its cheeks had even attained a vibrant hue.
When Lucinde was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s she donated the baptismal doll and everything else that reminded her she’d once had a child of her own. But there was still a phantom indentation on the bed from the doll’s weight.
Beneath her sorrow lurked an ugly current of smug piety. She’d warned Maria that the boy was no good. Tony had no job, no education, no future. A thug who wasted his days getting high with the gangs that ran in the neighborhood.
Lucinde couldn’t hold back tears at her callous judgment, but the need to lash out and blame anyone other than the person responsible overwhelmed her. How could a loving God allow her precious child to die while her worthless murderer was alive and well in prison? Surely God had guided every aspect of the tragedy, so her questioning His decisions felt immoral, blasphemous even.
She was tired from the short walk to the kitchen. She could have fallen, broken something, and then where would she be? But she was proud of herself for still remembering so much about Maria and the doll.
Several pale shapes moved in the street. She put her glasses on but the forms still seemed both startlingly small and shockingly monstrous. They danced in a disquieting manner.
She gasped when someone knocked on her door.
Jarrod
stopped knocking.
Screw it. Lucinde was probably safely asleep. Come back in the morning. He turned across the hall to #302. A faint bass beat throbbed inside. Shitty dub step music.
He knocked, cupped his hands to the door and called Sophie’s name. His annoyance made him raise his voice a bit too much. He realized he sounded furious.
Sophie plucked strands of hair from her scalp. Her mom was still making weird noises in her sleep, so she turned the stereo up. She heard the security door slam then noticed that the blue numbers from the oven’s clock were extinguished just before the radi
ance of the city’s street lamps faded like heat escaping pavement at nightfall.
She stared out the black rectangle of the window and continued to methodically tug clumps of her hair out. Her mother stopped making sounds, though Sophie did hear her shift on the bed followed by a soft thump on the floor. Probably an empty wine bottle.
The prescribed antidepressants had done little to curb Sophie’s trichotillomania. It wasn’t fair. Most girls her age didn’t live in a wasted slum, didn’t have to contend with a bedridden mother and their own anxiety that compelled them to compulsively pull their own hair. And she sure as hell didn’t know anyone who’d lost a goddamn arm.
She heard tiny plastic shoes clattering up and down the street. This reminded her of the time she’d wandered the hills several years ago.
Sophie is barefoot, her cheap plastic shoes have split and fallen off, but the ground is soft sand and the largest pebbles rounded by water activity years ago. The possibility of a flood rushing through the ditch raises the fear that somewhere high up in the hills a reservoir will burst its banks and sweep her away. This fear tickles her mind like the tiny stone caught between her toes.
Sophie’s Doll is pressed into the dirt wall. The doll’s face is a smooth pink button in the dirt, round as a teacup saucer in her doll set at home. She scrapes the dirt out of its eye sockets, rubs her thumb across the lips to reveal its elfin face flushed strawberry-pink from the intense sun.
She names him Noah because that was her father’s name.
Sophie held a memory of Noah walking away down the hall of their home on Fig Street. She must have dreamt it. The doll had probably just been misplaced in one of their many moves over the last few years. Or crushed at the bottom of a box so her mother had thrown him away hoping Sophie wouldn’t remember he existed.
A commotion in the street, like wisps of steam escaping a vent. Were there toddlers stumbling around out there?
Something began to scream in a voice that wasn’t a child’s. Sophie jumped when someone at the door growled her name.
Jarrod
spoke Sophie’s name once more, softly this time. Exasperated, he slapped his palm against the wall. Something skittered in the space between the sheetrock. Powder filled his lungs.
He coughed. Hoped it wasn’t some malignant mold stirred up.
The iron wrought front gate to the complex snapped shut. He heard footsteps running down the sidewalk. An anomalous sound, the click clack of a child wearing tap shoes sprinting across concrete.
Jarrod raced down three flights of stairs. He’d always been athletic and his prosthetic leg was state of the art, so he quickly cleared the steps. The front gate was closed. He turned his flashlight on, but the night sky blended seamlessly with the ground.
He opened the gate.
There was nobody around. It was late and a weeknight, but there should still be the hum of city life, the roar of traffic, police helicopters. Anxiety sweat coated his face. Breathing far too heavily for a man as fit as himself. Something could be lurking in the darkness just a foot or two from him, shrouded in impenetrable blackness. The thought angered him more than anything else. He felt as if someone were spying from their hiding place, mocking his inability to get to the root of whatever was going on.
The complete lack of electricity made him wonder if some bizarre atmospheric disruption had knocked out the power. Could an electromagnetic pulse cause such a widespread power outage, or was that limited to the realm of sci-fi? Mark would know about the science of it all, but Jarrod didn’t and was uncomfortable with the implications.
He walked along the sidewalk, flashlight skimming the ground to prevent stepping on any shards of glass from broken bottles scavengers inevitably dropped while raiding the apartment building’s dumpster. The feeling of being observed intensified as if the parties watching had increased in quantity. Something under the cover of a deep shadow hissed.
Jarrod was relieved when his flashlight’s beam picked out a cat dashing across the pavement over the cinderblock wall. He was probably just being watched by several of the feral cats a well meaning but annoying tenant kept feeding. Pussy jumping at pussies. Ha ha.
His light’s beam revealed a petite doll’s shoe in front of a shrub. He picked it up, thought of that summer years ago.
Jarrod just 9, his grandfather recently felled by a stroke. Grandma had invited him and his sisters Sarah and Angela to keep her company on the ranch while school was out. A summer of playing hide and seek around the property and swimming in the lake. Months of cartoons and unhealthy food and peeled skin sunburns. Not one care to be had.
His sisters had their own guest bedroom but Jarrod had to sleep in his grandmother’s doll room. He was usually too exhausted from playing all day to mind despite those frozen bisque faces smiling down from their display cases and shelves.
But some nights he’d lay wide awake and stare at the soft swath of starlight shining across synthetic hair and porcelain skin. On those nights, when he’d eventually fall asleep, he rarely remembered his dreams. Now as an adult when he dreamt it was of his sister Sarah all those years ago.
Sarah splashing in the water. Angela and Jarrod thinking she was joking so by the time he swam to her his chest felt hollow and Angela was sobbing in the shallow water but he was too scared to dive down deep into the murky depths to grab Sarah’s hand. Just watched her sink deeper, staring at him with no recognition. An expressionless doll’s face.
Jarrod placed the shoe back on the ground. Couldn’t believe he was crying. Sorrow turned to embarrassment to anger. Fucking weak Jarrod. Fuckin’ weak.
A light turned on in the building.
Someone was moving around in apartment #303.
The Doll
adjusts the machines. Moves the mirrors into position. Carefully arranges everything just so.
Lucinde
opened her door a crack. She couldn’t imagine how the person who knocked was able to disappear so quickly.
#303’s door was open. The sepia light escaping into the hall meant they had power. She heard a child’s voice inside and felt an irresistible urge to be elsewhere, to escape this dreary place, push back her encroaching dementia that much longer. She knew it was irrational but she was convinced the baptismal doll was within reach.
Diabetes had reduced her to a fragile bird-like thing. No matter how aggressive her Alzheimer’s had been in devouring memories she’d never forget waking up in the hospital after the surgery. One leg above the covers, a cast wrapped around her ankle that ended in a stump. Her beautiful Maria sitting next to her petting the back of her wrist as if it were a delicate newly hatched chick. She’d been mortified; she knew her skin felt like dry leaves and her face was far too old to be her daughter’s mother. But she couldn’t form the words to explain this.
Oh mija. Oh mija, Maria mija. Mija. My foot is in a hole. I can’t find my foot. My foot is in a hole.
She wanted to tell Maria how proud she was, how much she loved her and how she wished she’d stay away from that boy who wasn’t good enough. But her brain and mouth refused to cooperate. Phantom words took their place:
Oh mija. My foot is in a hole. I can’t find my foot.
She’d closed her eyes to keep from crying, but when she opened them again her phantom foot felt bloated with medications, ached with surgical violence. Her daughter was gone. The only occupant in the room a black pit descending into the floor. The pit kept moaning over and over,
My foot is in a hole.
But it was just useless flesh. Something rancid that necessitated disposing of. She survived diabetes, survived the death of her child, she’d continue surviving. She crossed herself, whispered her daughter’s name, blew out the candles. She left her apartment, her belongings, her life. Left everything behind.
Sophie
couldn’t hear whatever was screeching on the street anymore. She looked through the peephole. There was nobody at her door.
She grabbed a flashlight from the junk draw
er, cradled it under her armpit as she used her real hand to unlock and slide the latch aside. She cautiously opened the door a few inches, held it ajar with her stump, moved the flashlight around as if teasing an invisible kitten. She felt her phantom hand spread its fingers, the weight of the door against the non-existent palm. The dark seemed to impede the beam’s reach though she could see that room #303 had a light on.
Sophie had been excited to see her dad that day. It had been his visitation weekend and they’d gone out for frozen yogurt. Picked her up in his battered ‘87 Toyota, gardening tools strewn in the back.
A drunk off-duty police officer leaving a strip club in the late afternoon cut his SUV across Carlisle St. into oncoming traffic. Side swiped the truck as her dad tried to swerve out of the way. The drunk hit the front of the Toyota, slid from dad’s side diagonally until the steaming hot grille pressed against Sophie’s tiny left arm, mangling it beyond any hope of recovery.
The doctors successfully performed an amputation, but her father had suffered such severe head trauma he died 30-minutes after arriving at the hospital. Sophie was 5-years old then but clearly remembered the SUV’s baby seat in the middle of the road next to her father’s rakes, leaf blower, plastic garbage cans. She remembered the small smile on her dad’s face, temple resting against the steering wheel, black blood matting his hair to his forehead. One eye closed, the other partly open as if he were in mid-sneeze. A comical ventriloquist dummy’s face.
She’d never truly missed her arm. It was like losing a tooth, and though limbs couldn’t grew back in like her molars, the vacancy felt appropriate. An infection lanced by a sterile needle, the pressure of sickness relieved.
A surge of affection for her mother caused Sophie to hesitate, but she wanted to discard her decade of existence and start over. To be done with this miserable world that offered nothing to a bright 10-year old girl who just wanted everything to stop being so steeped in gray monotony and self-loathing desperation.
Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales Page 9
