But Lewis, showing no fear, raised the club and slowly began to advance.
“You stand back, I say, and go back to the shadow!”
The drunk charged forward, screaming.
Crouch squeezed off the shot and it struck Lewis Briery in the chest, but the man seemed unfazed and proceeded still. Crouch hurled the useless firearm at the man and missed.
“Join the boy in the fiery chasm, ye will. Together ye will dwell with sinners in hell.”
Briery lurched forward, flying through the air like an enraged bat, the nightstick poised aloft. He struck Crouch atop the head with a sharp crack, with such force that blood began to leak and dribble down the doctor’s angular face. Briery backed away, gritting his teeth. Crouch did not fall, nor did he fight back or writhe in agony. He just stood there, paralyzed by the blow. He seemed confused, though his eyes glimmered with the tentative understanding of his death. He slowly put his hands out before him and watched his blood rain down and pool there in his palms. A moment later, he fell to his knees — and slumped over dead on the floor.
Briery dropped the bloody club to the ground. He lifted up his pants leg and unsheathed a knife. He then approached the woman’s corpse with purpose, uttering: “There will be life…”
○
Neville heard the clamoring footsteps of his fellow policeman coming to his aide. He looked up, and there was Officer Ryan, helping him to his feet. The other officers gathered round, their faces twisted in confusion. They saw the nascent blaze blossoming inside the warehouse. One officer shouted orders to fetch the municipal fire department.
By now citizens had begun to poke their sleepy heads from darkened windows, or wander curiously into the street. Meantime, Neville related what had happened; he told them all about Briery. “He’s inhuman, I tell you.”
After this, he gathered himself and, accompanied by his fellow officers, hastened through the broken window in pursuit of the drunken fiend they all knew as Lewis Briery. With Neville leading the way, they crossed the warehouse with pistols drawn, their free hands shielding their faces from the heat of the rising blaze. They filed down the hallway and entered the laboratory. What they witnessed lurking inside made them ill at ease. There was Doctor Amos Crouch, lying face down in a pool of crimson. There was Thomas Blackwell, sitting up on the floor, strangulated by what appeared to be an umbilical cord, which dangled from (A dead woman? Pregnant?) Neville stood there, confused and goggle-eyed, the pain of his ear all but forgotten. There was the haggard Briery, standing over the corpse, metal glinting in his hand.
“Lewis Briery!” roared Neville. “Dammit, man, drop the bloody knife!”
Briery froze, the knife angled down over the tight mound of belly. His jittery eyes rolled from face to face. White, maddened froth encircled his lips.
“For God’s sake, you monster, put the knife down. Now!”
An air of anxiety possessed the faces of the other officers. One officer, upon seeing the carnage, bent and retched in the corner. But no sooner had Neville withdrawn his pistol than Lewis Briery began bawling. He dropped the knife clattering to the ground, and through his tears, said: “Just a child, it is. A small helpless soul. Only trying to save it, I was. Have ye no pity on the living? Have ye no pity on the dead?” He looked down at the belly, placed his hand gently upon it. Neville noticed the rivulets of blood flowing down Briery’s leg.
Lewis Briery turned and faced the officers, wheezing. He then fell to his knees, grabbing the wound in his chest, and looked at Neville.
He said, “Tell all I see them… on the other side. Dark and flimsy… and strange noises, they make.” He stared off at some world that no one else in the room could see. “Is that me mum, I see? Is that… me daughter? Lord, I’m so cold.”
With feeble breath, he continued. “Only the dead will see beyond the morning. There will always be life. And death.”
And no sooner had Lewis Briery spoken those words than he slumped over dead on the floor, forever gone to walk in shadow.
○
The Next Day
The fire had been extinguished before it reached ravenous proportions. Much of the main room’s interior, however, had been consumed. On this stark morning, smoke subtly oozed out of every orifice of the building. Locals gathered out front, making inquiries to the authorities circulating amongst the place. Old men of varying class stood stroking their beards or rubbing their chins, gossiping to one another about what had transpired.
“I hear Dr. Crouch went mad and set the place ablaze,” said one.
“I always suspected he was unstable,” said another.
A wiry man with a white Darwinian beard grimaced and waved his finger. “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong, sir. I hear that that devil, Lewis Briery — you know, the brute with the eye patch — tried to rob Dr. Crouch and Mr. Blackwell, and then set the place afire to conceal his crime. A bloody shame, really. The poor lad had his whole life ahead of him.”
More speculation circulated amongst the spectators.
Later that morning the bodies of both Dr. Amos Crouch and the forever young Thomas Blackwell were examined by local authorities, and both murders were ruled as exactly that — murders. They were identified by family, and funeral arrangements were made by the respective kin. The mother of Thomas Blackwell had been so grief stricken at the sight of her dead child — her only child — that she no longer wished to live, proposing to the mortician that she be buried alive with her boy, so she could comfort him with song. So she could sing the words she’d sung to him as a child, on those nights when the wind hissed outside his window, or when curious shadows loomed over his bed. Her proposition was denied in earnest, and Blackwell would be buried alone in the box. The body of Lewis Briery, however, whose soul was hastily — and perhaps naively — charged with the murders, was that of another story. His gnarled corpse would later be arranged for pick up by a surgeon in Liverpool, whose anatomical endeavors would indeed prosper from having legally obtained a specimen. And then there was the mother — and her unborn child. Her body was identified by a local merchant as one Rachel Smith, a Lancashire native who’d allegedly engaged in numerous prostituted affairs. She’d been no one of importance, her family having long been deceased.
Later that evening, as the sky swelled with the promise of rain, she and her brood were reinterred in the churchyard grave. The Reverend John Ferguson watched from the window of the cathedral’s tower as they — four solemn-faced men — placed her back in the box. The lid was nailed in place once more. The soil was repacked. And then night fell. It rained.
…and from the darkness it came
The night sails by on the English breeze
The owl and trees in unison sing
Of love and life and precious breath
Of war and woe and untimely death
The earth is fertile, the soil rich.
A mother lay weeping, her belly a twitch…
It crawls and cries and kisses her face
It leaves her to rot in the dark of this place…
…this place, this case, this lonely place
Where worm and time make their meal
She bids farewell — and forever dreams
The following morning was grey and misty, bitterly cold. Reverend John Ferguson emerged from the cathedral for his morning stroll through the churchyard. He hobbled alongside his cane. The grass was glazed with morning frost. He looked up and scanned the churchyard and regarded the barren trees and the yellowed leaves riding the breeze, and he inhaled deeply and savored this moment of life and breath. Time had taught him that life was indeed short.
He walked past several headstones. Many were leaning and stained with mildew. Many bore the names of those he’d known, while some dated back long ago. He thought about the woman and the child. He looked up in the direction of the grave — How tragic — and ambled toward it.
Once there he saw the twin tracks scored into the ground. He followed
them away with his eyes until they disappeared in the narrow passage in the woods. The wind shook the trees. He looked down at the heap of dirt, and for a second — for a brief glitter of time — he contemplated the existence of God. He shunned this notion, shaking his head, and looked sadly at the grave. And as he did he noticed something peculiar.
He leaned forward, squinting through his spectacles. There was a small area of dirt, slightly disturbed. He poked it with his cane and dirt collapsed down the small tunnel-like opening — a burrow — much like a wild animal might make. He leaned in closer and discovered something stranger still: Small footprints, in the dirt. His eyes narrowed. He looked over his shoulder and scanned the cemetery. He looked up at the church’s steeple; it was faded and obscured by the lingering mist. He looked back down at the grave, scowled, and scrawled the dirt with his cane, erasing the infantile footprints, obliterating any notion of the absurd.
Jason Muller is currently completing his secondary education at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. An award-winning collegiate essayist, his work has appeared in The Journal of College Writers, while his fiction has appeared in The Edge of Propinquity, A Fly in Amber, Night Chills, and Stories That Lift.
The Doll in the Window
by Anne M. Pillsworth
The garlicky reek of Bella’s Pad Thai made Peg push aside her Moo Goo Gai Pan.
“Bland stuff,” Bella observed. “You should try Hunan chicken.”
Every Wednesday they ate at the musty Cambodian restaurant on Hope Street, and every Wednesday Peg ordered moo goo, the most innocuous item on the menu. “Hunan’s too hot for me,” she said. “Willard loved it, I remember.”
Peg sipped tepid tea. A psychodynamics convention in Hong Kong had infected Willard with a passion for Asian food. Until his first stroke, the smell of soy sauce had haunted her kitchen; even now, six months after his death, her refrigerator shelves clinked with pickled ginger and chili paste. Well, as soon as she got home, she’d toss out every bottle.
She put down the tea cup. “If you want to stop at the drug store, Bella, we’d better go.”
“Have to, the way I snagged my pantyhose. You shouldn’t plant roses by a walk.”
That was what Willard had always said. Roses on the gateposts? They would rust the ironwork. Next summer, Peg’s Constance Sprys would cover the posts with deep-cupped pink blooms like the ones on her new sofas. Which reminded her: she had to decide what to do with Willard’s couches. Chintz shouldn’t share space with burgundy cowhide.
They stepped out of the restaurant into cool September sun. As Peg turned toward the East Side Pharmacy, Bella grabbed her arm and said, “I don’t want to go to that old place. The new place in Pawtucket discounts deep.”
Arthur Grossman had made a fortune delivering society babies, but Bella pinched pennies as if she limped along on Social Security. Tacky behavior. Willard had encouraged Peg to associate with Bella, and what had Peg known, barely out of her teens? Of all the doctors’ wives, only Violet Granger had appealed to her, and poor vague Violet was in a nursing home now.
Willard gone, did she need to stick with Bella and her set, smiling at their well-worn stories and their ever-new photos of grandchildren, pretending not to notice their smug condescension? As they walked to her car, Peg played with the revolutionary thought like she’d played with her chintz samples, draping them over the leather couches until flower-strewn sofas had taken on possibility.
They drove down Hope Street into Pawtucket. A stack of neon signs marked the new shopping plaza. Peg dropped Bella off at the drugstore and squeezed into a parking slot by the fence. The view was uninspiring: a side street of cramped ranches and capes. She was about to raid the stack of decorating magazines on the back seat when she saw the child waving. Or was it a child?
It stood in the window of a shotgun cape with a tiny porch and not even a few shutters to break the white monotony of aluminum siding. The window had fiberglass curtains. Ceramic swans swam across the inner sill, plastic daisies sprouting from their backs. The doll — Peg saw now it wasn’t an actual toddler — wore pinstriped pajamas. Its painted red hair and pursed red lips left its sex in question, and the red bandanna wrapped around its crown gave it an incongruously rakish look. With its raised right arm, it looked like it was waving at the parking lot, at Peg.
An old woman had to live in the house, alone, childless. Sad that she had nothing but a doll for company, and pathetic that she put her loneliness on public display.
Bella plopped into the car. “You should’ve seen the buys—”
Peg cut off the impending list. “Bella, see that doll? Isn’t it strange?”
“Oh, that. I’ve seen it before. People living there must be nuts.”
Peg drove past the cape. She felt a smile tug her lips. There was something sweet about the doll’s eager face and perpetual wave. Willard would have said she was slipping into the sentimentality that was her worst nature.
But Peg let the smile stay put.
○
Two days later, Peg’s sofas arrived. To make space, she had the delivery men carry the leather couches into Willard’s study. The study was getting crowded — she’d already taken in boxes of his clothes and books, his telescope, and the bust of Cicero that had brooded on the parlor mantelpiece. Soon the framing shop would have her Fantin-Latour rose prints ready to replace Willard’s muddy Braques. The abstracts could go into the study, too, and when she’d finished gathering discards, she’d call a dealer who bought out estates. Come spring, she’d redo the emptied study; she already had a sample of the wallpaper, blue and cream stripes.
For now it was enough to store Willard’s things out of sight and to sink into the luxury of her new sofas.
○
The next Wednesday, Bella was gone to the Berkshires, which freed Peg to have her lunch in a coffee shop: tuna on white toast and tea in a real cup, with a handle. After lunch, she bought turkey breast at the deli, croissants from the bakery. Her last stop was at the new drugstore — just because Bella patronized it didn’t mean Peg couldn’t shop there.
She parked again by the fence, facing the cape with the doll. After she bought her toothpaste, she sat in the car, pretending to scrutinize her receipt, actually looking across the street, into the window. The doll looked exactly the same as before. Didn’t the old woman ever change its clothes or rearrange its plastic limbs? And who was it watching for? Funny, in spite of its pirate bandanna, it reminded Peg of the Christ Child crowned, lifting a hand to scatter blessings. Maybe that was how the old woman thought of it, which would be a happier explanation than dementia.
Over the next couple months, Peg began to include the Pawtucket drugstore in her shopping round. She always checked on the doll. It never changed, and she never saw the owner of the cape, though someone had to live there. When she drove by at night (on her way to somewhere else) a dim lamp backlit the doll. As autumn drew on, the plastic chair on the porch disappeared and brown mums replaced the pot of anemic impatiens. Occasionally a red pickup stood in the driveway. Probably it belonged to someone who came to check up on the old woman.
That was none of Peg’s business. The doll itself interested her. It was an inadvertent symbol of something she struggled to name, of contentment in solitude, of innocence untouched by decay, oh, of holding on to hope. To know the owner would degrade the doll to whatever she considered it: a decoration (tasteless) or a joke (half-witted) or a substitute child.
Eventually, shyly, Peg began to wave back at the doll. She kept her hand low, so no one would catch her at the silly ritual. But when she was actually waving, she didn’t feel silly. Instead she felt a warm pull of connection, as if she were more the owner of the doll than the unseen old woman in the cape, and as if owning it in the plastic flesh would be a tender thing.
Over Thanksgiving, Peg went to see her brother on Long Island, the usual dull visit except for her trip into New York to see a revival of South Pacific. It was d
elicious to pass unsmiling people leaving the Off-Broadway intellect benders Willard had preferred, while she hummed snatches of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The afternoon she returned to Providence, she drove to the drugstore to indulge herself in a smile at the doll. But the doll was gone.
Its window was swanless, curtainless. Peg got out of the car and stood at the fence, breathing fast. A For Sale sign decorated the square yard of dead grass in front of the cape. The plastic chair that had summered on the porch stood at the curb, along with stuffed garbage cans, an end table with a broken leg, and a plaid recliner that puffed batting out its arms. In the driveway was the red pickup and coming around it was a pot-bellied man, forty or so, lugging another can.
Sticking out of the can was a dimpled toddler’s hand.
Somehow Peg got enough air into her lungs to call: “Sir!”
The man peered at her. “Something wrong, lady?”
“I was wondering. The person who lived in that house—”
“Mom,” the man said. “You a friend of hers?”
“An acquaintance. I’ve been away.”
“Oh. Well. Mom died Monday, over to Memorial. Guess you knew it was coming?”
The man sounded concerned.
“Yes,” Peg lied. “Still, it’s sad.”
“Yeah, but she’s better off now. I’m Bob, by the way.”
“Peg,” she said, then added, “My condolences.”
“Thanks. Well, got to finish cleaning up. Nice to meetcha.”
Peg walked into the drugstore, but she didn’t get the milk she’d gone for. Instead she stood at the magazine rack by the window and watched the cape. The fourth garbage can stood by the leaky recliner, with the doll’s hand sticking out.
Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 8
