Everything That’s Underneath

by Kristi DeMeester

  “Sleep tight,” she said. A giggle escaped her throat, but she didn’t smile. She lay across the floor, the blanket tented over her head, and I reached across the space and wound my fingers through hers. I could taste her. Salt and sweet and, underneath everything, the slight tinge of putrefaction.

  Legs and wings whirred against each other; phosphorescent skins gone transparent, and we tipped forward and looked with many eyes.

  “I can take it out of you. Easy as anything. Pluck,” the Dark Lady stood before me, her hands arched as if taking a ripe fruit from the vine. “Nothing at all really. And think of all the years unfolding before you. All for you.”

  My mouth opened, my teeth snapping for the soft, wet thing she held. “So hungry,” I said and she smiled. There were no teeth to it. Only browned gums and a furred, slick tongue, and I covered my face.

  “How long would it give me?” I said.

  “Had we but world enough and time.”

  Somewhere back in the dim light of our bedroom, Mina’s fingers pressed against mine. A tether holding me to her. To Dad. To the diseased things Momma passed to us.

  My stomach ached, roared to be filled, and the Dark Lady brought that furred tongue to my cheek. “Is it enough, love? Could it ever be enough? And when your blood betrays you, your lungs mottled and diseased, will they be enough? Your father locked away in his bedroom dreaming of a dead woman. Your sister coughing secret blood into her palm and you pretending not to see. Your bodies fading into something you don’t recognize, and your father standing over the three women he buried and then following them down into the dark.” She lifted a lock of my hair off my shoulders. “Tell me what you want.”

  I opened my mouth. Swallowed.

  “Please. I was the first,” I said, and the light went out.

  All That Is Refracted, Broken

  Paul would only look at me through the mirror.

  “This is the only way I can see your soul,” he told me that last time, the time before he vanished, and he positioned the burnished bit of glass so that only my eyes were reflected. I blinked, and he angled the mirror beside my face, making sure I couldn’t see inside, and counted my eyelashes aloud.

  “Other people can look at me without a mirror. You don’t need to see my soul to see me,” I told him, but he shook his head, dark hair flying.

  “Yes, I do. I have to be sure.”

  * * *

  He wasn’t supposed to live. Was supposed to drown inside Momma’s belly, supposed to go to sleep and wink out like a star. When she told Daddy that the baby wouldn’t survive, he said that he couldn’t be with a woman who was broken and left us. Momma took all of our family pictures down. The empty hooks snagged at my sweaters whenever I walked past.

  But then she came home with Paul clutched to her breast, a squalling red thing, and he grew and laughed and spoke. But no matter how I cooed, how I sang, he wouldn’t look at me, would duck his head and shift his eyes away any time I tried to catch his gaze.

  Anyone, everyone else, he would stare at directly, green eyes unblinking and curious. It was only me, only his big sister, whose eyes he avoided. At first Momma said it was because he was just a baby, that he didn’t know what he was looking at, but by his first, and then his second birthday, he still hadn’t looked at me.

  Momma took him to doctors, and words like autism and Asperger’s syndrome floated through the house for months, but no diagnosis ever came.

  “He’s perfectly normal,” the doctors told Momma.

  “He talks to her. Plays with her like any other kid. He loves her. Why won’t he look at her?”

  “It’s a phase. He’ll grow out of it,” they reassured her with soft voices, and I squirmed under their gaze. Surely they knew that it was me. That there was something wrong with me and that was why Paul would keep his head down whenever I entered the room, but they couldn’t say it while I was there. When Momma was alone, they would explain that her girl was the problem.

  My childish mind came back to the thought again and again. I had something inside of me that he didn’t want to see. I prayed to God every night, promised him that I wouldn’t complain when Momma made me scrub the toilet or eat rutabagas if only he would get rid of whatever it was lurking just under my skin.

  Momma begged Paul. Told him she would buy him anything he wanted if he would just look at me, but he would always turn away. And my heart would break a little more.

  * * *

  Buried under moth-eaten quilts and yellowed dishtowels, a silvered glinting cast refracted light onto the ceiling, and Paul pulled the mirror out, polished it with his shirt.

  “If you tilt it up and look down, it’s like you’re walking on the ceiling,” I told him, and he did as I told him, took a few unsteady steps before tumbling forward, laughing the entire way down. I laughed with him.

  I didn’t understand then. I still don’t. Not completely.

  I’m not sure when he turned the mirror in my direction. There was only the gasp of surprise, the eruption of giggles, and his tiny fingers pressing into mine.

  “I can see you!” he exclaimed, and I curled my hand around his and marveled at how love can make it hard to breathe. How the knowing of it is almost painful.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon bent around one another, his fingers tracing the mirror. I told myself for a long time that I hadn’t felt his touch against my skin, his childish hand poking my eyes, my nose. I told myself that I had imagined it, that we were only two children lost in the magic of a rain-dappled afternoon.

  Seven years passed, his eyes watching me through only the mirror, and time swallowed the reality of that day.

  I wish I had believed.

  * * *

  Sometimes he did that. Said that it was quieter down there, that he could sleep better. We would find him tangled in a nest of blankets, a pile of worn paperbacks stacked within arm’s reach, a flashlight tucked under his arm.

  But when I tiptoed downstairs, intent on scaring him awake, there were no blankets, no books, no gangly thirteen-year-old boy asleep on the floor. A part of me must have known something was wrong because my guts turned icy.

  We searched the rest of the house, Momma saying over and over “He’s here somewhere. He’s got to be here somewhere.”

  But he was nowhere.

  We called his friends from school, asked if he had turned up at their homes in the middle of the night, but each call led to nothing more than a mother who hung up the phone and went to check on her own children.

  After that, Momma stopped talking.

  When we had looked everywhere, asked everyone, I called the police.

  Momma stared out the window while I spoke to them, described what he looked like, gave them his most recent school photo.

  “We’ll do all we can,” they told us, but no amount of doing can bring back something that’s vanished.

  When they left, I screamed until my throat felt bloody. But it didn’t bring him back.

  * * *

  “Where did you go?” I whisper to the emptiness of my bedroom.

  I think I might drown in the silence of this house.

  * * *

  It felt heavier than I remembered, and the backing was more tarnished, a deep layer of soot that would not wipe away.

  He had never let me look into the mirror.

  “It’s only for me. You can’t see your own soul. If you do, you’ll go away and never come back,” he’d told me not long after he found it.

  “But you can see yourself in it, right?”

  “It’s different for me. I was supposed to die when I was a baby, so I can see things other people can’t.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” I said.

  But I’d humored him, and before long, I didn’t think about daring to peek. Perhaps I thought what he’d said was true. Perhaps I was afraid of what I might see, of what might happen.

  * * *

  Momma hasn’t moved in days. Won’t eat. I don’t know if she sleeps. She
stares out the window, waiting for Paul.

  If he comes home, he won’t come through the front door.

  * * *

  “Yeah?”

  He picked at his cuticles, fidgeted in his chair.

  “Some people believe you can get your soul caught inside a mirror. That once it’s there, it starts to go rotten. To get evil and stuff. Sometimes, the people don’t even know their soul is in there, but when they die, they’re stuck in the mirror, and they do terrible things to get out.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they trick people. And if they’re strong enough, they can steal someone else’s soul. Because that’s what they want. More than anything. To get out of the mirror. To be human again. Most of the time when you look in the mirror, it looks just like you, but if you pay attention, you can see them moving around. And they watch us, too. Try to figure out ways to escape.”

  I turned to look at him then. He’d placed the mirror on the kitchen table. For the first time since he’d found it, it was face down, and he’d turned away from me.

  “What kind of crap do they have in your library anyway?” I said.

  I didn’t think much of it then. Figured he’d seen a scary movie at a friend’s house and had a few nightmares or read a few too many horror novels. It’s what kids do.

  But over the next few weeks, he followed me, the mirror trained on my face, his step always behind me. Whenever I went to bed, he looked worried, and there were several nights I heard my bedroom door creak open, a mirrored flash landing against my eyes before the door would shut.

  * * *

  “Paul? Is it you?” I ask the mirror when it appears, but it doesn’t respond.

  I think Momma is dead, starved to death in her chair, but I’m afraid to look.

  * * *

  “I don’t know. I like it better this way. What if I did, and it wasn’t you?”

  “What do you mean? Of course it would be me. Who else would it be?”

  He watched me through the mirror, his eyes dark.

  “I don’t know,” he says again.

  * * *

  “Will you come back? Will you come back if I look?”

  Light shines against the ceiling, shimmers and dances in ecstasy. I stand over the mirror, and I stare down, the ground dropping away from my feet.

  The creature in the mirror isn’t me. The eyes are all wrong, the cheeks too thin and hollow, the fingers long and crooked. The other me grins with broken teeth.

  Then the image warps, bloats endlessly, and then the face is Paul’s. He is pale, his lips gone white, but he smiles, and for the first time, his eyes look into mine, and all that remains of me shatters into tiny pieces.

  I blink, and the reflection is just my own face again, and a slight shadow streaks into the corners.

  “Oh, Paul,” I say, and my reflection wraps its lips around my words, repeats them back to me soundlessly.

  “What have you done?”

  I can feel his hands on my face, his fingers wiping away the tears, and I press my own to the mirror, hope that in whatever nightmare world he’s trapped himself to save us, he can feel my touch in the way that I can feel him.

  But there’s nothing more than the hard glass beneath my hands and a scream building in my belly.

  Tonight, I will place the mirror under my pillow. Face up. If there is any magic left in the world, it will find the mirror there and bring my brother back. I swear I’ll take his place.

  Please. Let it bring him back.

  December Skin

  They’d found the motel just before dark. Big drips of sky painting the pines black and jagged, and the cold palpable and worming. They had not thought to bring jackets.

  Rory crammed her meager body onto the floor of Aaron’s old F100 while he fed lies to the rheumy-eyed manager. His pop was dying, and Aaron hadn’t seen him in years. Divorce, you know? He was headed up there now, to pay his respects, get some things off of his chest before the old sonofabitch finally bit the big one. Couldn’t he overlook that he was only seventeen and rent him a room, just for the night?

  Pressing herself against the floor, Rory tried to absorb what residual heat she could from the engine. They’d been driving for hours now, outrunning the coming night, but the shadows had grown deep and full and Aaron had left her in the truck, the keys tucked deep into his right pocket. What she wanted was to sink those keys deep into his eye sockets, listen for the soft pop as the optic nerve separated. Her teeth chattered. From under the truck, something chattered back.

  But there was the overhead light popping on, and Aaron hauling himself behind the wheel. “Room’s around back. We’re going to have to run,” he said and threw the truck into gear.

  “You ever woken up in the middle of the night? You don’t know why, but suddenly your just wide awake and staring at the ceiling, and you’re sweating under the covers, and you’re lying there, listening to your heart beat, and somehow, it just doesn’t sound right? Like the beats are just slip-sliding around, and you take a couple of deep breaths. To regulate. Only it doesn’t help, and for a few seconds, your heart just stops, and you can hear everything, all the silence that’s in the spaces in between your heartbeats?”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “You can fall into that space. Fall in and never climb out.” From beneath the truck, the chattering grew louder.

  “Stop it, Rory,” he said, and she curled more tightly against the floorboard.

  “You pretend, little brother. So full of your fake concern,” she hissed, and she thought of touching him, letting him feel the coldness living in the place where her heart once beat, but he had to get her inside, had to get her away from the gathering night and even she knew this.

  “Don’t move. I’ll come and get you,” he said. Outside, over the truck’s rumbling, something laughed deep and long.

  When he cut the engine, he leaned against the steering wheel, let his hair fall over his face. Sitting that way, he looked like a child, small and tucked into himself. For a moment she wanted to reach out to him, but her hands twitched, and she smiled at the thought of ripping his scalp from skull.

  Then he was moving, running through the gloom before throwing open the door and pulling her against him, her body suddenly weightless as he pulled her from the truck and shoved her toward a door.

  The numbers glinted against the black. “1306! 1306!” they seemed to scream. One by one, the lights around them began to blink out, the doors of the other rooms disappearing, swallowed as if some rotting maw had opened and begun to eat.

  She wanted to open her arms to it, whatever lurked beyond the world, wanted to breathe it in, hold it there in the cold places that filled her. Because she knew about them now, the things that lived on the periphery, in the spaces between. She would give herself to them, these eaters of skin, of innocence, and they would make of her something vast.

  “Come on, come on!” Aaron said, and his fingers closed around the keys, fumbled once, twice, before slipping into the lock, and then they were tumbling into the room, Aaron slamming the door behind them before frantically throwing light switches.

  A dull glow filled the small space. A single bed sat in the center, a yellowing quilt tucked military tight over the lumpy mattress. On the wall, a faded watercolor of cows grazing. Someone’s idea of quaint, homey touches of Americana. A window opened to the exterior, spilled shadows into the room, and Aaron pulled the curtains closed. There was the deep, earthen smell of mold, and Rory breathed it in, letting the scent of decay spread through her lungs.

  Aaron watched her now, the dark shadows under his eyes like bruises. He clenched his hands, both sets of keys bound tightly in his fists. If she looked at the light, tried not to think about what lurked outside the door, she could almost ignore the cold, could almost imagine that the thing that had crept inside of her was quiet. Something sleeping, but not dead.

  He jerked his chin toward the bed. “You should get some sleep.”

  “Not ti
red. You’re the one who should sleep. Driving like you have been.”

  He shook his head. He doesn’t trust you, she thought. It made her smile to know this. He had more sense that she’d ever given him credit for. Where she was the intellectual, the literary-minded obsessive who quoted Joyce and Rand, Aaron was a video game addict whose Neolithic grunting only stumbled into actual speech when ordering at Taco Bell.

  “Is it better,” he said. A statement rather than a question.

  “In the light? You know it is.”

  “But it isn’t gone. It’s still in there. Waiting for it to get dark.”

  She had no response for him, and he turned his head away, stared at the window. It had been Aaron who found her with the cat, huddled in the shadows of the porch as she ate sloppily, slimy strings of meat stuck in her teeth.

  “The fuck,” he’d said, and she’d grinned at him, her eyes yellow bright in the darkness.

  He’d taken her inside, wiped the blood from her face, her arms and fingers before putting her to bed, but she hadn’t slept. Instead, she’d whispered to him, told him about the deep emptiness between the beats of a heart, told him that they had found her there at the bottom of that hole and filled her up with cold and night. He’d stayed with her, listened quietly as she told him of darkness.

  Two weeks later, she woke under the porch, her skin sticky and streaked with mud and crimson. Before her lay a tiny frilled dress, the light pink mottled with darker stains. She’d asked him to take her away then, asked if he could keep her from the dark. If he would run with her, keep her from doing this thing to the people they loved. And he had.

  Outside of the window, something scratched, the high-pitched hum of claws against glass. When Aaron turned two middle fingers in the direction of the sound, Rory laughed. It felt good to laugh, to push all of the cold somewhere else for the briefest of moments.