by Greg Herren
“But these blatant attempts to get attention, Danny, I have to say, you’re starting to make me wonder about you.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“I mean, are you okay?”
“Get the fuck out of here!” He screamed the words so loudly that he was surprised the windows didn’t blow out.
“I’ll go.” Matthew backed toward the door. “But I’m really starting to think you need to get some help.” The door slammed behind him.
“Fuck you.” He picked up the wineglass and drained it. He refilled the glass. Maybe I am going crazy, he thought as he gulped down the wine and refilled the glass again. All this fuss and bother over a shoe. Maybe I am hearing things. Maybe I’m just going crazy. Maybe I am just trying to get attention, Matthew’s attention, maybe that is what this is all about, I’m mad because he didn’t ask me to move in with him, and—
Fuck that, he thought. I am not crazy. I did hear something. Something chewed up my shoe. And where did my night-light go? Where’s Mickey? I didn’t just leave it somewhere different.
There’s something in this apartment.
That’s crazy.
Maybe I am cracking up.
He finished off the glass of wine and rinsed it out in the sink, recorked the bottle, and put it back into the refrigerator. He turned off the lights and went into the bedroom, carefully getting undressed. He picked out the clothes he would wear the next day and put them on the chair before lacing up the new shoes Matthew had bought him and placing them on the floor by the chair.
The light went out.
He uttered a half scream before he could stop himself. Just a blown bulb, he told himself, shivering slightly. He groped his way out to the hall and flicked the switch.
Nothing.
There was a sound, so soft he could barely hear it. Goose bumps rose on his arms, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. He stood completely still, ears straining to hear, his heart pounding, his breath coming quickly, in and out.
The sound had been in the bedroom.
Where the fuck is my flashlight? he wondered, his mind quickly flashing through the process of putting new things away, seeing himself putting silverware in the drawer, extension cords, light bulbs, the hammer, the screwdriver—all of that was in the storage room where the washer and dryer were.
He heard it again—a soft noise, just a little thump, like a book falling over on a bookshelf. What the hell? He was starting to shiver.
Get out of here, I need to just get out of here, it’s stupid to just stand here in the dark, listening, it’s nothing, it’s just an old house settling, all old houses make noises, there’s nothing in the bedroom, my imagination is just working overtime, call Matthew and apologize, this is so stupid…
The bedsprings squeaked.
He screamed and ran for the front door, not caring about getting his keys, he wouldn’t be able to find them in the dark anyway, his mind racing. Just get the hell out of here, there’s something in there, I don’t know what, but there’s something in the bedroom, I am not going crazy, I am NOT GOING CRAZY! I am not, I am not, I am not, I am not, I am not going crazy, there’s something in there…
He tripped and fell headlong, crashing to the floor with a loud thump, his head banging on the floor, the breath knocked out of him.
There was a rustling sound from the bedroom, a kind of scuttling noise, coming out of the bedroom, into the hallway.
He began to sob as he scrambled to his feet, his head ringing and aching and thumping, the breaths coming in gasps as he headed for the door in the darkness, the dark clinging to him, as though not wanting to let him free, he was almost there—
Something grabbed his ankle.
He screamed.
*
“This is how I found him,” Matthew said to the paramedic. “I just came by to see if he was okay, and he was just sitting there on the floor, staring into space, all curled up.”
“And he hasn’t spoken?” The paramedic looked at Danny, who was just sitting on the floor, his arms curled around his legs, rocking back and forth, eyes blank and staring.
“Not a word.”
Two of the paramedics helped Danny to his feet. He went along with them, obeying their commands, and then they helped him onto a stretcher. Matthew watched, his eyes filling with tears as they began to move the stretcher out of the apartment. When they reached the door, Danny looked at Matthew, and for just a moment his eyes seem to focus.
“Dark,” he said clearly, and then his eyes swam out of focus again.
Ordinary Mayhem
Victoria A. Brownworth
1.
The fascination began when Faye was a child. The darkroom, the red light, the big black and white timer that made a loud ticking noise as it wound down, the trays of liquid that turned the paper into pictures as her grandfather moved them back and forth with his fingers or a pair of big wooden tongs with plastic on the tips. She would sit on the high stool in the darkroom and watch as the paper came out of the big yellow boxes and then slid into the white pans of fluid that had that slightly acid smell that reminded her of the dead mice they sometimes found near the basement door.
Her grandfather never spoke to her when they were in the darkroom. He just moved from tray to tray, making the papers swim gently in the liquid that glowed red in the light. When the timer went off, the images would begin to appear on the paper: jagged pieces of clothing, a half-formed face, a disembodied leg, the flail of an arm. When the completed pictures finally came through, he would pull the photographs out of the fluid and hang them by the corners with little wooden clothespins on a thin piece of rope that ran the length of the darkroom.
Then he would take a magnifying glass and look at each picture. Sitting behind him, Faye would see an eye bug out, or a mouth go askew, or the side of a face puff up. In the hazy cast of the darkroom light, everything looked red, everything looked as if it had been soaked in blood.
Some of the photos her grandfather would mark with a silver pencil that came out white in the corner of the pictures, which were still wet—she could see they were wet, which made the images swim together. Some he left alone. There was a small black fan that ran all the time, back behind the trays. The photographs would move ever so slightly on the line, but they never blew around, never touched each other. When they were all hung up and all checked, or not, with the silver pencil, then the red light would go out and the door would open, and he would tell her they had to wait for the photographs to dry. Sometimes she would look back to see what was there, but the room was dark without the red light and she could see nothing at all. It was all black inside.
Later, they would sit at the kitchen table together and her grandfather would set things out on a big piece of yellow oilcloth. A dozen or more little white glass pots with heavy, dark, oily paint in them. Reds, magentas, purples, and blues that looked like small organ meats with their thick, gelatinous consistency. The greens and yellows seemed like mold or fungus, but without the thick furring at the edges she had seen sometimes on rotting food. The paints smelled sharp, a smell she could never place because it wasn’t like anything else.
Her grandfather would give her little pieces of his canvas board and a pencil and three pots of her own and some Q-tips. He let her draw and paint while he sat bent over the black and white photographs, slowly turning them to color. He would twirl tight little pieces he tore off cotton balls, dip them gently in the thick paint, and paint the photographs with the delicate details their owners wanted.
Faye would always watch him before she started her drawings. Watch the slow, meticulous way he twirled the cotton and how carefully he worked on the linen photographic prints. Sometimes he would take a cotton ball and rub it over a photo to make the color softer and lighter. She always noticed how red the lips were. From where she sat they always looked like wounds in the faces of the people. Deep gashes that would never, ever heal.
They could do this for hours—sit at the table with
the white pots and the cotton and the photographs—without speaking. When the photographs were finished, he would slide them into sleeves of parchment paper and put them in the cabinet behind where the cameras and tripod were kept until whoever’s photographs they were came to pick them up.
Sometimes, when no one was watching, Faye would open the door to the darkroom and turn on the red light. She would set the timer and slide pieces of paper from the yellow boxes marked with big letters, OPEN IN RED LIGHT ONLY, into the trays of fluid. She would sit on the stool and wait, but no images would appear in the trays. She would think about what images they would be: She would squint her eyes the way she had seen her grandfather do over and over and she would imagine the pictures.
The images she saw always looked like slices of bodies, half-finished faces, torn shreds of clothing. And always, they were bathed red, like the darkroom light, like blood, like the gashes of mouths her grandfather painted on the photographs. When she closed her eyes, they were still there: the charnel house images that were the bits and pieces from the pans of liquid. When she closed her eyes, the red light still burned behind her eyelids and pulsed, like a vein, until she turned off the light and left the room.
2.
Later, when Faye was sent away to the convent school for girls, she was often called to Mother Superior’s office for this or that minor infraction. At first, in the early days, she felt fear, but soon she began to like the trips from the building where her class was to the one where Mother Superior’s office was. She liked the solitude, she liked the opportunity to explore. She would walk across the schoolyard, stopping briefly at the grotto with the sleek, despondent Virgin Mary standing within the hewn gray stone recess. Faye would stare up into the face of Mary and wait to see if she would speak to her like she had to the children at Fatima or to St. Bernadette at Lourdes. Sometimes there would be leaves at the feet of the Virgin and other times she would find small dead things—rodents or birds, because the grotto was set into a wooded area and there were feral animals, foxes and racoons and cats, that came out from the trees to kill.
When she found dead animals, Faye would pick them up with leaves or sticks and take them to the bushes and lay them on the ground. She kept a notebook of sketches and each time she found a dead animal, she would draw it later, trying to remember exactly how it had been when she’d found it—if the neck was broken, if the mouth was open in a final scream, if it had puncture wounds or missing parts, if it was stiff and cold, or still limp and warm. Sometimes, when there was more than one, she would arrange them together on piles of leaves, sort of like a burial pyre she had seen in a book. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was she was cataloguing with the drawings, but she knew they were important and she knew they meant something, so she was meticulous about them and would look at them later to be sure she had gotten everything right. She never killed anything herself, but she was always grateful that it was she who had found the dead things and not someone else. It was like a secret between herself and God. Or so she imagined it was.
After Faye left the grotto, walking back down the slate path and on toward the high school building where Mother Superior’s office was, she sometimes heard crying. She was never sure exactly who it was, but it always seemed to come from the same place, the music rooms where one of the nuns, Sister Anne Marie, would compose different kinds of music for the girls to sing at the regular musical events that were held at the school. The place was named for St. Cecelia, the patron saint of music, and so music was a major part of the school’s activities. Faye thought Sister Anne Marie was probably the person she heard crying. She thought it must be hard to love music so much but never be able to choose what music you listened to because nothing here was a choice, it was all up to God, or so they were told every morning in catechism class.
Sometimes Faye would walk closer to the place where the music rooms were—the small, two-story cottage across the stretch of lawn from where the grotto was—because she liked Sister Anne Marie. Faye thought she was nice, but sad, and there didn’t seem to be anything that made her less sad. It was always the same—the sadness. Sometimes, when the nun played the piano for them in music class, she looked different. Not happy, exactly, but something else—glowing. Like the angels in the pictures in the catechism books. Music made her glow. But Faye knew that there was something else, she just didn’t know what it was. But she was sure that was who was crying, because another time she had seen Sister Anne Marie in the grotto, on her hands and knees in front of the Virgin Mary, her forehead touching the ground. And she was crying then, too, and hitting the slate of the grotto with her hands, slapping it over and over again, pounding it with her hands flat against the rippled gray slate. She was saying something, but Faye could only hear certain words. The only ones she was sure she heard were “sacrifice” and “terrible” and “killing.”
Faye had stood behind a bush near the grotto and watched. When Sister Anne Marie got up, there was blood on her hands, and little bits of leaves and twigs had stuck to them. She had looked at her hands and then she had turned and looked back at Mary. When she turned back around, Faye could see that the expression on her face was exactly the same as Mary’s—sad. Very, very sad.
After Sister had walked away and gone back to the music rooms, Faye had gone up to the spot where the nun had been. The slate apron in front of Mary had smears of blood where Sister Anne Marie had been. Faye could see the mark of her hands on the slate—a thick, dark red gore. She had bent down and touched it, had rubbed her fingers together, feeling the consistency of the blood mixed with dirt and a little bit of leaf matter. Faye had taken out her notebook and pressed the blood onto a page, wiping the blood off her fingers onto the paper. Then she had closed the book and stared up at Mary for a long time.
There was a fire escape that ran down the side of the building where the music rooms were. Once there had been a fire drill and Faye had heard the alarm and one of the girls hadn’t known it was a drill and she had started to cry, saying that they were all going to be burned alive and it would be like going to hell. Sister Anne Marie had looked at Faye with a look Faye didn’t quite recognize—some kind of distress. Faye thought she was upset because Faye’s parents had been burned to death in a car crash, but Faye knew all about that. About the blood and the smoke and the flames in the snow and probably screaming. She was sure there had been screaming, because one day she had turned on the stove in the kitchen at her grandparents’ house and put her hand in the flame and held it there for as long as she could, until she started to scream, involuntarily. Her grandmother had come running in and grabbed her hand out of the blue flame and put it under the cold water of the tap, then she had put ice on it. Faye’s hand had turned red and there had been blisters on her fingers and she had thought how terrible it had been for her parents in the car, screaming, with no one to come and pull them out. But now she knew what it would be like, the fire. Now she knew.
Faye had turned to the girl and said, “There’s no blue flame. There’s no smoke. There’s no blood. So we won’t die. And it won’t be like hell, because there would be snow, too, and flames in the snow, and there’s no snow.”
The girl had stopped crying, but she still looked scared. Sister Anne Marie had stared at Faye, then. Her eyes seemed wider than before. The look on her face was strange, Faye thought. And not much different from that of the girl.
3.
Outside Mother Superior’s office, the big parquet off the closed door of the room had a row of hard, straight-backed chairs along the wall. Faye was supposed to sit and fold her hands in her lap with some semblance of the contrition she never felt, but instead she would walk up the steps to view the alabaster statue of St. Cecelia that lay on a white marble slab at the landing of the stairs, beneath a stained-glass window depicting the appearance of Mary to the children at Fatima.
The body was life-sized and lying on what looked like a stone coffin of the sort she had seen in the old cemeteries she’d gone to with her
grandfather. She was mesmerized by the statue of the fallen saint, and never failed to touch it, even though that was forbidden and the nuns would slap you if they caught you. The young saint lay on her side, as if she had merely fainted, like some of her classmates did when they were fasting, and someone had placed her on the closed tomb and arranged her body there, as if she were sleeping. But Cecelia, the patron saint of the school, wasn’t sleeping, Cecelia had been struck down by an infidel—there were three deep slices in her neck.
Faye always slid her fingers into the crevices where the wounds were, wondering, because she was fascinated by the lives of the saints and read as much as she could about them, what it had felt like to die that way, to have your head nearly sliced off, and to have fallen dead so openly, with the wound of your death exposed to everyone who passed. Her parents had died that way and Faye always thought death should be more private. That’s why she always moved the little dead animals she found near Mary’s statue in the grotto to a more secluded place.
There was no blood on St. Cecelia, of course. Just a vast whiteness of the body. The lovely face, eyes closed, the folds of her garments, and the three telltale wounds spread open on the neck, open so wide that a young girl’s fingers could slip into the spaces, but not quite fill them. Faye would wonder if Cecelia had tried to hold the wounds closed. She didn’t think it was possible, but she wondered.
Other times Faye would forgo the statue for her other fascination: the science library that was always open and empty whenever she was there—she had never seen the high school students inside, even though she knew it was used for the biology lectures. She had several years to go before she was in the high school. She wondered if the mysteries of the science library would be revealed then.
The room was very large, yet had no windows. Faye thought maybe they had been closed up, like in one of the Edgar Allen Poe stories, because the things in the room shouldn’t be seen in the light, or from the outside by someone peering in. There was a smell that layered itself over the whole room that would make you gag after a while and she thought that was why the room was always empty and the sliding wooden doors were always open. She knew what the smell was—it was formaldehyde, the same smell that she remembered from the funeral home when her parents were killed. It was a smell that got caught in the back of your throat and lay there, until it was really hard to breathe and you had to get as far away from the smell as you could because the smell was always attached to death and it might be able to take your breath with it. Or so she thought.
