Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “I have no idea. I thought at first maybe I was just crazy. If I hadn’t seen the frost on the freezer window, I don’t think I would’ve believed later on that it had been Jenny at all. Or anything but an hallucination.”

  Helen was obstinate. “But it’s got to mean something.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  I slept through the next day fairly peacefully, and when I awoke, Helen was gone. I watched television, then called a few friends to set up lunches and dinners for the following week.

  Helen walked through the door at six-thirty in the evening, and said, “Well, I found that alley again. I pulled back one of the boards.”

  When she said this, I felt impulsively defensive—it was my alley, it was my boarded-up restaurant, I felt, it was my hallucination. “You didn’t have to,” I told her.

  She halted my speech with her hands. “Hang on, hang on. Oliver, the windows are bricked up beneath the boards.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “Yes,” she said, “they are. You couldn’t have gotten in there.”

  We argued this point; we were both terrific arguers. It struck me that she hadn’t found the right alley, or even the right Pallan Row. Perhaps there were two Pallan Rows in the city, near each other, perhaps even almost identical alleys. Perhaps there was the functional Pallan Row and the dysfunctional Pallan Row.

  This idea seemed to clutch at me, as if I had known it to be true even before I thought it consciously.

  The idea took hold, and that night, on the pretext of going to see a movie that Helen had already seen twice with friends, I took a cab over to Pallan Row.

  It was colder on Pallan Row than in the rest of the city. While autumn was well upon us, and the weather had for weeks been fairly chilly, down the alley it was positively freezing. My curiosity and even fear took hold as I peeled back one of the window boards, the very one I had pulled down on my last visit. Helen had been right: the windows were bricked up beneath the boards. But then, I had to wonder, why the boards at all?

  I touched the bricks; had to draw my fingers back quickly, for they seemed like blocks of ice. I remembered the owner of the Chinese restaurant telling Jenny and me that it used to be an ice house. I touched the bricks again, and they were still bitingly cold—it hadn’t been my imagination.

  I walked around the alley but saw no way of getting into the buildings again, for all were bricked up.

  And then I heard it.

  A sound, a human sound, the sound of someone who was trapped inside that old icehouse, someone who had heard me pull the board loose and who needed help.

  I am no hero, and never will be. For all I knew, there were some punks on the other side of that wall torturing one of their own, and if I walked into the middle of it, I would not see the light of day again.

  And yet I could not help myself.

  I found that if I kicked at the bricks, they gave a little. The noise from within had ceased, but I battered at the bricks until I managed to knock one of them out. It seemed to be an old brick job, for the cement between the blocks was cracked and powdery. After an hour, I had managed to dislodge several.

  To my surprise and amazement, there was light on within the old restaurant. I looked through the sizable hole I’d made and saw the former proprietress of the Chinese restaurant standing behind the bar, dressed in a jade-colored silk gown, talking with her barman. A few people sat at the tables, eating, laughing. None of them had noticed my activity at the window.

  As I put my face to the hole, I breathed in air so cold that it seemed to stop my lungs up.

  I moved back and stood up. I was sure that this was a delusion; perhaps I needed some medication still, for immediately after Jenny’s death, I had begun taking tranquilizers to help blot out the memory of finding her dead. Perhaps I still needed some medical help and psychological counseling.

  I crouched down again to look through the opening and noticed that at one of the tables, facing the other way, was a woman who looked from the back very much like Jenny.

  I noticed the ice, too. It was a shiny glaze along the walls and tables; icicles hung down from the chocolate-patterned tin ceiling. I watched the people inside as if this were a television set. I lost my fear entirely. All my shivering came from the arctic breezes that stirred up occasionally from within.

  I thought I heard someone out in the alley behind me, and turned to look.

  Helen stood there in a sweatshirt and pants, my old windbreaker around her shoulders; she held a sweater in her arms.

  “I figured you’d be here. Look, it’s getting chilly,” she passed the sweater down to where I sat on the pavement. She noticed the bricks beside me, and the light from within the building. “I see you’ve been doing construction. Or should I say deconstruction.”

  “Do you see the light?” I asked her.

  She squatted down beside me. “What light?”

  “I know you see it,” I said, but when I glanced again through the hole, the place within had gone dark.

  “What is it about this place for you?” she asked. “Even if you did see Jenny here, or her ghost, whatever—why here? You and she only came here once. Why would she come here?”

  “I think this is hell,” I said. “I think this is one of those corners of hell. I think Jenny’s in hell. And she wants something from me. Maybe a favor.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  I nodded. “Don’t ask me why. There is no why. I think this is a corner of hell that maybe shows through sometimes to some people. I don’t even think maybe. I know that’s what this is.”

  “You may be right,” Helen said. She stood up, stretched, and offered me her hand to help me get up. I took it. Her hand was warm, and I felt a rush of blood in the palm of my hand as if she had managed to transfer some warmth to me.

  And then, the sound again.

  A human voice, indistinct, from within the walls.

  Helen looked at me.

  “You heard it too,” I said.

  “It’s a cat,” she said. “It’s a cat inside there.”

  I shook my head. “You heard it. It’s not just me. Maybe Jenny can only show herself to me. Maybe hell can only show itself to me, but you heard it.”

  “Wouldn’t Jenny’s ghost be in your old apartment where she died?” Something like fear trembled in Helen’s voice. She was beginning to believe something that might be dreadful. It made me feel less alone.

  “No. I don’t think it’s her ghost. A ghost is spiritual residue or something. I think she is in here, it’s really her, in the flesh, and I think there are others in here. I need to go back in and find out what exactly she wants from me.”

  The noise again, almost sounding like a woman weeping.

  “Don’t go in there,” Helen said. “It may not be anything. It may be something awful. It may be somebody waiting in there the way somebody waited for Jenny.”

  I took her face in my hands and kissed her eyelids. When I drew back from her face, I whispered, “I love you, Helen. But I have to find out if I’m crazy. I have to find out.”

  We went and sat in an all-night coffee shop talking about love and belief and insanity. Because I was beginning to convince myself that Pallan Row was a corner of hell, I waited until the sun came up to investigate further within its walls. Helen returned with me, and between the two of us, we managed to break enough bricks apart and away from the wall so that the hole grew to an almost-window-sized entrance.

  I asked her to wait outside for me, and if anything happened, to go get help. I went in through the window, scraping my head a bit. The room on the other side was empty and dark, but that unnatural ice breath was still there, and, through the kitchen portal window, there came a feeble and distant light.

  Helen asked every few seconds, “You okay, Oliver? I can’t see you.”

  “I’m fine,” I reassured her as often as she asked.

  I walked slowly to the kitchen door, looked through the round windowpane. The light
emanated from the freezer at the other end of the long kitchen. I pushed the door open (informing Helen that this was my direction so that she wouldn’t worry if I didn’t respond to her queries every few minutes) and walked more swiftly to the walk-in freezer.

  The freezer door was unlocked. I opened it, too, and stepped inside.

  The light was blue and as cold as the air.

  Through the arctic fog I could make out the shapes of human beings, hanging from meat hooks, their faces indistinct, their bodies slowly turning as if they had but little energy left within them. I did not look directly at any of these bodies, for my terror was becoming stronger—and I knew that if I were to remain sane as I walked through this icehouse of death, I would need to rein in my fear.

  Finally, I found her.

  Jenny.

  Ice across her eyeless face, her hair, strands of thin, pearl necklace icicles.

  She hung naked from a hook, her head drooping, her arms apparently lifeless at her side.

  Her belly had been ripped open as if torn at with pincers, the skin peeled back and frost-burnt.

  I stopped breathing for a full minute, and was sure that I was going to die right there.

  I was sure the door to that freezer, that butcher shop of the damned, would slide shut and trap me forever.

  But it did not.

  Instead, I heard that human sound again, closer, more distinct.

  I heard my heart beating; my breathing resumed.

  The sound came from beyond the whitest cloth of fog, and I waved my hands across it to dissipate the mist.

  There, lying on a metal shelf, wrapped in the clothes that Jenny had been buried in, was our baby, his small fingers reaching for me as he began to wail even louder.

  I lifted him, held him in my arms, and wiped the chill from his forehead.

  Someone was there, among the hanging bodies, watching me. I couldn’t tell who, for the fog had not cleared, neither had the blue light increased in intensity. I could not see to see. I felt someone’s presence, though, and thanked that someone silently. I thanked whoever or whatever had suckled my child, had warmed his blood, had met his needs. The place no longer frightened me. Whatever energy the freezer ran on, whatever power inspired it, had kept my child safe.

  I took my son out into the bright and shining morning.

  “This was why I was haunted,” I told Helen upon emerging from the open window. “This is what Jenny wanted to give me.”

  I can only describe Helen’s expression, through her eyes, as one approaching dread. She said, “I think you should put it back where it belongs.”

  “Babies aren’t ‘its,’” I said, and recalled saying this to Jenny once, too, at this very place. Or had Jenny said it to me? We had been so close that sometimes when she said things, I felt I’d said them too. I glanced down at my boy, so beautiful as he watched the sky and his father, breathing the vivid air.

  Across his forehead, I saw a marking, a birthmark, a port-wine stain, perhaps, which spread across his skin like fire until he became something other than what might be called flesh.

  The Rendering Man

  1

  “We’re gonna die someday,” Thalia said, “all of us. Mama and Daddy, and then you and then me. I wonder if anyone’s gonna care enough to think about Thalia Inez Canty, or if I’ll just be dust under their feet.”

  She stood in the doorway, still holding the ladle that dripped with potato chowder.

  Her brother was raking dried grass over the manure in the yard. “What the heck kind of thing’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Something died last night.” Thalia sniffed the air. “I can smell it. Out in the sty. Smelt it all night long, whatever it is. Always me that’s first to smell the dead. ‘Member the cat, the one by the thresher? I know when things’s dead. I can smell something new that’s dead, just like that. Made me think of how everything ends.”

  “We’ll check your stink out later. All you need to think about right now is getting your little bottom back inside that house to stir the soup so’s we’ll have something decent come suppertime.” Her brother returned to his work, and she to hers. She hoped that one day she would have a real job and be able to get away from this corner of low sky and dead land.

  The year was 1934, and there weren’t too many jobs in Moncure County, when Thalia Canty was eleven, so her father went off to Dowery, eighty miles to the northeast, to work in an accountant’s office, and her mother kept the books at the Bowend Motel on Fourth Street, night shift. Daddy was home on weekends, and Mama slept through the day, got up at noon, was out the door by four, and back in bed come three a.m. It was up to Thalia’s brother, Lucius, to run the house, and make sure the two of them fed the pigs and chickens, and kept the doors bolted so the winds—they’d come up suddenly in March—didn’t pull them off their hinges. There was school, too, but it seemed a tiny part of the day, at least to Thalia, for the work of the house seemed to slow the hours down until the gray Oklahoma sky was like an hourglass that never emptied of sand. Lucius was a hard worker, and since he was fifteen, he did most of the heavy moving, but she was always with him, cleaning, tossing feed to the chickens, picking persimmons from the neighbor’s yard (out back by the stable where no one could see) to bake in a pie. And it was on the occasion of going to check on the old sow that Thalia and her brother eventually came face-to-face with the Rendering Man.

  The pig was dead, and already drawing flies. Evening was coming on strong and windy, a southern wind which meant the smell of the animal would come right in through the cracks in the walls. Lucius said, “She been dead a good long time. Look at her snout.”

  “Toldja I smelled her last night.” Thalia peeked around him, scrunched back, wanting to hide in his lengthening shadow. The snout had been torn at— blood caked around the mouth. “Musta been them yaller dogs,” she said, imitating her father’s strong southern accent, “cain’t even leave her alone when she’s dead.”

  The pig was enormous, and although Lucius thrust planks beneath her to try and move her a ways, she wouldn’t budge. “Won’t be taking her to the butcher, I reckon,” he said.

  Thalia smirked. “Worthless yaller dogs.”

  “Didn’t like bacon, anyways.”

  “Me, too. Or ham.”

  “Or sausage with biscuits and grease.”

  “Chitlins. Hated chitlins. Hated knuckles. Couldn’t chaw a knuckle to save my life.”

  “Ribs. Made me sick, thought a ribs all drownin’ in molasses and chili, drippin’ over the barbecue pit,” Lucius said, and then drew his hat down, practically making the sign of the cross on his chest. “Oh, Lord, what I wouldn’t give for some of her.”

  Thalia whispered, “Just a piece of skin fried up in the skillet.”

  “All hairy and crisp, greasy and smelly.”

  “Yes.” Thalia sighed. “Praise the Lord, yes. Like to melt in my mouth right now. I’d even eat her all rotten like that. Maybe not.”

  The old sow lay there, flies making halos around her face.

  Thalia felt the familiar hunger come on; it wasn’t that they didn’t have food regularly, it was that they rarely ate the meat they raised—they’d sold the cows off, and the pigs were always for the butcher and the local price so that they could afford other things. Usually they had beans and rice or eggs and griddle cakes. The only meat they ever seemed to eat was chicken, and Thalia could smell chicken in her dreams sometimes, and didn’t think she’d ever get the sour taste out of her throat.

  She wanted to eat that pig. Cut it up, hocks, head, ribs, all of it. She would’ve liked to take a chaw on the knuckle.

  “She ain’t worth a nickel now,” Thalia said, then, brightening, “You sure we can’t eat her?”

  Lucius shook his head. “For all we know, she’s been out here six, seven hours. Look at those flies. Already laid eggs in her ears. Even the dogs didn’t go much into her—look, see? They left off. Somethin’ was wrong.” He shuffled over to his sister and dropped his arm
around her shoulder. She pressed her head into the warmth of his side. Sometimes he was like a mama and daddy, both, to her.

  “She was old. I guess. Even pigs die when they get old.” Thalia didn’t want to believe that Death, which had come for Granny three years before, could possibly want a pig unless it had been properly slaughtered and divvied up.

  “Maybe it died natural. Or maybe,” and her brother looked down the road to the Leavon place. There was a wind that came down from the sloping hillside sometimes, and coughed dust across the road between their place and the old widow’s. “Could be she was poisoned.”

  Thalia glanced down to the old gray house with its flag in front, still out from Armistice Day, year before last. A witch lived in that house, they called her the Grass Widow because she entertained men like she was running a roadhouse; she lived alone, though, with her eighteen cats as company. Thalia knew that the Grass Widow had wanted to buy the old sow for the past two years, but her parents had refused because she wasn’t offering enough money and the Cantys were raising her to be the biggest, most expensive hog in the county. And now, what was the purpose? The sow was fly-ridden and rotting. Worthless. Didn’t matter if the Grass Widow killed it or not. It recalled for her a saying her daddy often said in moments like this:

  “How the mighty are fallen.” Even among the kingdom of pigs.

  Lucius pulled her closer to him and leaned down a bit to whisper in her ear. “I ain’t sayin’ anything, Thay, but the Widow wanted that sow and she knew Daddy wasn’t never gonna sell it to her. I heard she hexed the Horleichs’ cows so they dried up.”

  “Ain’t no witches,” Thalia said, disturbed by her brother’s suspicions. “Just fairy tales, that’s what Mama says.”

  “And the Bible says there is. And since the Bible’s the only book ever written with truth in it, you better believe there’s witches, and they’re just like her, mean and vengeful and working hexes on anything they covet.” Lucius put his hand across his sister’s shoulder and hugged her in close to him again. He kissed her gently on her forehead, right above her small red birthmark. “Don’t you be scared of her, though, Thay, we’re God-fearin’ people, and she can’t hurt us ‘less we shut out our lights under bushels.”