As Rex continued to push, Garrison heard a sound following them. The thud kept time with them, and he wondered if perhaps the wheels were misaligned, the rubber skipping on the tiles beneath. But it seemed impossible. Wouldn’t he have felt the chair slip if it had? It was so hard to think straight. Perhaps he had imagined the noise as he’d imagined seeing his mother in the other room, staring her horrible stare.
Rex brought the wheelchair to an immediate halt.
“Do you hear that, bro?”
“It sounds like—”
“It sounds like someone is actually in this dump. Up there!” He pointed, and down the hall a shadow of movement disappeared around a corner. “Hang on,” Rex said, and started pushing the wheelchair as fast he could onward. Rooms filled with imagined faces flickered by, snippets of sights that did not begin to register until after they were past, and by then too long gone to retain other than as a set of worrying impressions. When the two brothers navigated the corner, they found themselves in a cul-de-sac with no exit beyond a set of elevator doors. The floor numbers on the LED display above decreased rapidly, as though someone or something was being spirited downward and away from the pursuers. In an effort to stop the descent, Rex pressed the DOWN button repeatedly. It lit pale orange, but the moving car continued until it reached its destination.
“Did you see what floor it stopped at?”
“Huh?” Garrison was feeling confused. He tried to concentrate. “Um . . . was it B2?”
“Yeah. B2. I think it was. B2.” Garrison heard his brother continue to mutter the floor number to himself as they waited for the elevator to return, but when he looked Rex’s lips were not moving.
“Rex, do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Garrison swallowed. It sounded like singing from the hallways behind them. A low, monotone singing, though the words were indecipherable. Garrison strained to hear it, but soon it was masked by another noise. Was that thudding coming from within the elevator shaft or was it the blood in his ears? His cold sweat stuck close to his body as he shivered.
“I’m really not doing too well. I’m starting to hallucinate. I don’t know if I have the strength to hold on.”
The doors opened as he spoke, revealing a small wood-paneled box that smelled of pine. His brother wheeled him in, then pressed the B2 button and put his hand on Garrison’s shoulder. The doors closed tight before them.
“Don’t worry, bro. I have enough strength to hold on for the both of us.”
The lights in the elevator flickered with each floor they descended past, and Garrison worried something had gone seriously wrong inside his head; there was no way the trip downward could have taken as long as it seemed, nor could the elevator car have made so much noise—it was like a fist banging against the walls. When the elevator finally stopped, the doors opened with a jitter and what Garrison saw before him was not possible. The corridor looked more like a dank sewer than a hospital hallway. Ankle-deep puddles of foul water consumed most of the floor, and the sole source of light emanated from a lone bulb more than fifty feet away. The air smelled stale, stagnant, and foul. He looked to his brother, whose face betrayed no hint of surprise. Garrison struggled in the chair as Rex wheeled him free of the elevator.
“What’s wrong, bro?”
“Don’t you—the floor, it’s . . .”
“It’s what?”
Garrison did not answer. He shook his head, pressed the fingers of his good hand into his closed eyes, and did everything he could to bring reality back into focus. Yet when the stars cleared from his vision the same dank decay remained.
Rex pushed him down the hall, the wheelchair bumping over the uneven surface, the walls of the corridor barely visible in the gloom.
“Hello!” Rex called out. “Is there someone down here? I need a doctor!”
There was scrambling, something scurrying in the shadows, and Garrison’s legs were tickled by a thousand crawling insects. He panicked and looked down, but there was nothing there. Yet the paresthesia kept radiating outward, stealing away the sensation in his limbs. Garrison tried to speak, but a wave of inertia overtook him. Tongue dry and thick, throat closed, eyes tearing—Garrison could barely keep aware. Images of something moving toward him flickered behind his vision, but before he could see what it was he was struck hard across the face. Garrison’s eyes opened wide. Rex stood in front of him, rubbing his hand.
“Gar, hang on, bro. I need you to stay with me. Can you do that? Stay with me.”
Garrison nodded. The scenery around him sharper, though no less dank.
“Where are we?” he rasped. Rex did not respond. Instead, he looked ahead at the length of corridor.
“I saw someone in a lab coat duck away up ahead. I think we can catch him.”
Rex wheeled Garrison, accelerating until he reached a jog. Garrison held tight as best he could, tucking his head into his chest to prevent the flow of noxious fumes from passing into his skull. They traversed a large distance of uneven terrain, and Garrison was forced to shut his eyes to keep from seeing how close he came to being thrown off. When Rex finally stopped, Garrison pried his lids open one at a time. Before him was an old door set in the wall, long ago rotted black, a tiny window emitting low light as though from a hearth. Rex inspected it, perhaps sniffed it, and then without looking at Garrison knocked. It sounded like a battering ram. He waited, peered through the window, then knocked again with that same slow pound. As though in response, the scribbling knocking Garrison had heard before in the rocks, in the walls of the hospital, in the beat of his own blood, was returned.
“I don’t think—” was all Garrison managed before the door opened, bathing him and Rex in yellow light and illuminating the corridor around them. As he was wheeled forward Garrison wondered in his delirium if what he saw was real. Was the door before him actually set in the trunk of a wilted sycamore tree? And were he and Rex really moving through it?
Inside, the room was sparse and though skewed and unsettling, Garrison recognized its familiarity at once: it was similar to the room in which his mother had died. No, he thought, not similar to the room; it was the room. The same room. He knew the wallpaper, knew the tools laid out exactly on the small table. It was terrifying, and what made it worse was the bed when he finally saw it. In the middle of the room, its red sheets were cleaned and pressed, and surrounding it appeared to be photographs of Rex and Garrison as children, the older holding the younger tight to his side. Yet those images flickered in and out of reality, leaving behind fading memories. There were flowers too, but all had gone black with mould before drying and rotting away. It was the same room. The same room with a steady thud from somewhere behind the walls and, in the bed, hidden until that moment, the frail naked body of a middle-aged woman. Her skin pale, her arms as long and slender as her legs. She had been recently shaved from head to toe. Her face . . .
“Mom?” Garrison’s voice, pinched and high as a child’s, could only whisper the word.
But the woman who turned to him was not his mother. She was too young, too wide-eyed, too alive despite all appearances to the contrary.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Rex,” Garrison whispered without breath, his energy draining. He could not bear to look at her, the woman who was not his mother. It was her eyes. Her terrible amphibian eyes.
“Ma’am, have you seen the doctor around?”
“Rex.” Garrison tried harder, but still the words were barely audible. Those eyes—even compared to the other patients above, those eyes were too large, as though torn wide by bearing witness to something they could not stop seeing.
“My brother needs help. Where are the doctors? Where is everybody?”
“R—” was all Garrison mustered before his throat gave out. He could do nothing to stop the pale woman as she turned her dull face toward his brother, her wide eyes threatening to overwhelm him. Rex did not flinch, however. Instead, he stood taller.
“Where?” Rex dem
anded. The pale emaciated woman lifted a crooked finger as though it would be the last thing she would ever do and pointed to the giant wooden door that separated her room from the adjoining room. It was disproportionately tall, and as black and rotted as the door in the tree; behind it echoed the dull sound of slow thudding. The fact that Garrison had not noticed it before did not frighten him as much as the realization that until she pointed to it, the door had not been there—and that he was incapable of stopping Rex from trying the handle.
“It’s locked,” Rex said, jiggling the knob to be sure, but when he turned back he seemed momentarily shaken.
“What—is she okay?”
Garrison looked at the old woman who was not their mother. Crumpled on the bed, her arms and legs twisted in knots, head upside down but giant eyes wide open and staring. Fetid breath seeped from her mouth, and the final exhale could almost have been a word.
“Rex,” Garrison croaked, then threw up on himself.
“Hang on, bro. We’re going through.”
Rex took a step back and rammed his shoulder into the door, again and again with determination. Garrison heard the distant thudding turn to thrashing, but Rex would not relent, and the sound of cracking wood followed quickly. Over and over again he rammed into the door, and when he stopped, it was only to rub blood back into his shoulder and change tacks. He raised his foot and proceeded to kick the door with all his might, as though desperate for someone, anyone, to heed him.
Sitting in the chair half-conscious, looking past the dead woman at his frantic brother, Garrison nursed a bloody wound that seeped and seeped and tainted the air with the stench of rust. The sound of what was behind the door was deafening, and though he tried he could utter no warning. Each thunderous slam disoriented him further, and just as he lost track of whence the last had come, the lock of the giant rot-black door broke open, and his brother pulled the door wide and stood before the opening.
The black door blocked all sight of what lay beyond. All Garrison could hear was that pounding getting closer; all he saw was Rex’s arm extending out the back, his left hand curled around the broken doorknob with fingers drained of blood. Rex stood like that forever, facing down the sight of what caused that unholy thud, so long that Garrison worried he had finally lost consciousness. Unable to speak or move, Garrison could do nothing but stare. He watched for what seemed like hours, and wondered if what slipped from the doorway—those thin wisps of darkness, those ripples in reality as though it were a curtain—was his imagination or his delirium. Garrison blinked, and it took forever for the light to return. There was a creak, and slowly, ever so slowly, Rex stepped away from the door, stepped away from whatever he saw behind it. Garrison could see it from the wheelchair. It was contorted with fear, and tears were streaming down his face. With the door ajar that thudding noise sounded like a series of cyclopean footsteps, far more than two, steadily approaching, nearing the periphery. Rex was babbling incoherently, muttering some strange language as he backed further away, his eyes torn wide—too wide—with what could never be unseen. Garrison knew then one final thought, repeated over and over with each deafening footstep of oncoming inevitability. If what was beyond that door was too much for the unflappable, unshakable Rex’s sanity to bear, then what hope was there for a broken Garrison’s in the face of it?
By Invisible Hands
The puppet maker’s hands were wizened. He stared at them, at the gnarled knuckles like cherry galls on goldenrod, at the wrinkled leather skin stretched and folded in on itself so many times it sagged. Those hands were filled with pain and loss and regret that radiated outward like an unbearable heat. His hands were all he had left. His hands, and his memories. But those memories faded from his mind, slipped into the dark of the misty quiet town like the sound of an automobile in the distance. He swallowed another handful of pills and hoped that this day might finally be his last.
It had been so long since the puppet maker’s slow descent from master of his craft to . . . to whatever it was he had become. Ancient, neglected, forgotten, a shell of his former self. A relic of a bygone age where creativity had value, and skill was paramount. The puppet maker had forgotten far more about the art of creation than most had ever known, the slow leak of memories over the course of years. Some days, he no longer recognized himself in the mirror.
No one came for the puppet maker. No one cared for him. The only children he had ever bore hung on the wall of his basement, those ugly vessels for his love, with their large round heads and wrongly numbered wooden arms. He had sacrificed it all for them, sacrificed so he might bring wonderment to a public whose eyes grew increasingly duller the longer he performed for them, and at the end when no one seemed to notice or care about the art of bringing life to the lifeless, those bedeviled creations on his workshop wall did nothing but stare back at him unblinkingly, waiting for him to pass on. Unnoticed and alone.
At first, he did not understand the letter from Dr. Toth. He knew the man’s name, albeit distantly, but could not recall the context. Had they met, he wondered, in some past life, when the puppet maker was greeted warmly by wealthy and poor alike? Time slipped so easily from his recall, faster than the pills could staunch. And the note . . . the words were a jumble, their wavy scrawl like that of a palsied but familiar hand. He removed his glasses in hopes things would become clearer, but the words merely danced on the page, moving in and out of focus—sometimes disappearing altogether like phantoms. Even the paper they were written upon was strange, folded and creased so often it felt like linen. When through sheer force of will the puppet maker managed to fix the words in place, he did not like what emerged.
Mr. L——:
I have need of your services. Please come at once.
—Toth
The puppet maker reread the note, then discarded it in his wastepaper basket. There was nothing for which he could be needed. The only thing he had ever been capable of required use of his hands, his crooked old hands . . . and they could not be trusted to obey. The doctor did not have wealth enough to stymie the encroaching years that freely robbed the puppet maker of everything, left him forgotten and forgetting. Nonetheless, he later found himself in his workshop, unaware of how he arrived there, staring at the equipment concealed beneath dust-covered sheets. Had he descended the stairs? And what had the marionettes hanging on the wall witnessed? For they had witnessed something. It was clear from the way their hollow black eyes stared.
Perhaps days or weeks or months passed before a relentless pounding upon his door startled the puppet maker. Awoken from a medicinal haze, he shuffled to the door on a leg full of pins and peered through the window at the long black towncar idling on the street. Its driver had already reached the door of the house, and something about the man’s disquieting features filled the puppet maker with the coldest apprehension. Something that prevented him from opening the door.
“What do you want?”
He spoke loud enough that his words would penetrate the glass. The driver did not respond. His wide eyes merely locked on those of the puppet maker, and his mouth remained twisted in some unnerving attempt at a grin.
“You have the wrong house,” the puppet maker offered, then waited to see what the driver would do. A thick arm was lifted from behind the glass. It bore a square hand that was then laid flat against the window. The driver leaned his wide mercurial face in, the sort of face that looked as though it had been carved in caricature, and the puppet maker felt compelled to retreat, unsure if he were still lodged in a dream. Then that face pulled away, and the driver bent down and out of sight. An envelope slid under the door.
Filthy, crumpled, covered in large thumbprints, the stationery was unmistakable. With trembling hands the puppet maker withdrew the folded letter—wrapped delicately around a small stack of similar textured bills. The driver’s uninterested smile remained ineffable.
Mr. L——:
Please do not delay. The time is nigh. I have sent my driver to fetch you. The included
honorarium is only the beginning.
—Toth
The puppet maker looked up from the soft stationery, startled to find the driver was now inside. He overwhelmed the confines of the entranceway, and the afternoon light was warped by the shadow he cast. The puppet maker shrank from his abominable size and nodded in defeated acquiescence. He then reached for his rough, worn cane.
He rode the distance in the backseat of Toth’s towncar, across paved streets devoid of tree or bush. Yet even that pavement was not pristine. It was as cracked and crumbling as the skin around the corners of his eyes, and just like those eyes the streets failed him. They no longer led where his memories expected, Toth’s driver heading in the opposite direction of where he ought, speeding down avenues the puppet maker had never before seen. The old man sat with his cane tightly clenched in his aching hands, worried that he had erred greatly entering the cab. He asked repeatedly if they were indeed travelling the right way, but the disturbing driver remained mute, following a set of unknown bearings. There were few souls along the avenues of the small town, each one more hideous than the last. The puppet maker had no choice but to avert his eyes and trust the driver to take him where he needed to go. Soon the mists at the outskirts grew thicker, and any landmark that might betray their location or provide some anchor within the chaos was swallowed whole.
When Dr. Toth’s home appeared, it did so suddenly, emerging fully revealed in the swirling vapor. It was not as large as might have been expected, and was closer to dilapidation than suspicion would allow, but the outer walls, where black mould had not yet crept across them, were touched with unusual ornate carvings not found on other homes. Certainly not upon the puppet maker’s. At least, as far as he could recall, but as he twisted the handle of his cane he knew he might be mistaken. It had been so long since he viewed his house from beyond its four walls he could be absolutely sure of nothing. Nothing beyond his own encroaching debilitation.
Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales Page 8
