No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

“This is serious.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a long story. Is there any way you could send somebody?”

  “We’re running a little low on manpower at the moment,” the sheriff said. “We’ve got about two hundred households out there without heat and electricity. I’ve got every available man helping move these people into shelters before it gets any worse.”

  “This is an emergency,” he said, and his voice must have conveyed what the words could not, because the sheriff sighed.

  “What’s the problem?”

  Scott took in a slow, deep breath, aware that this might be his only opportunity to explain. “Part of this house, my family’s old house, has an extra room behind a wall. I found it tonight, and it’s very large. I went in and looked through the whole thing, and I think it might have been used as some kind of torture chamber.”

  Silence from the other end.

  “Hello?” Scott asked. “Are you there?”

  “I’m not in the mood for jokes tonight, Mr. Mast.”

  “Wait, don’t—”

  “Hang tough till morning. Tomorrow, if you’re still alive, I’ll come out and look at your torture chamber. Okay?”

  “No, I—”

  Click.

  Scott stared at the empty room, the door in the corner, and then out the window into the snowy night. Twelve miles to town on foot, a three-hour walk in temperatures that he wasn’t dressed for and a windchill factor of forty below.

  Or you can stay here.

  He went through the first floor of the house switching on every light he could find. Without any kind of flashlight or lantern, he was going to have to turn the entire house into one big lightbulb and hope it would get him as far as the road leading out to his car. He put on his boots, coat, and hat, no gloves, thumped through the entryway and out the door. Fine grains of snow peppered his face as he made his way cautiously down the steps. He could feel himself breathing it in.

  Get used to it. It’s a long way to civilization.

  From the moment he stepped outside, Round House loomed large over him, dark despite all its faint illumination from within, a monstrous presence whose shapeless outline became even larger and more imposing from the outside. His feet puffed into the loose white powder. Ankle-deep drifts off the front porch became knee-deep once he started slogging through them, and he knew the roads would be impossible to navigate even if he was somehow able to get the car free.

  The car—he thought again about Colette. What had she said?

  I parked around back.

  He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Colette!” His voice impossibly thin and faint in the night, the surrounding forest consuming it. “Colette!”

  He began walking around the outside of the house. Its great walls stretched out endlessly, and Scott was aware of the presence of the black wing, hidden somewhere inside beneath wooden planks and chimney bricks, pulsing like a hollow poisoned heart. Beneath the snow, the ground sloped downward. At last he could see the outer western edge of the building at the border of the night, as if it marked some final outpost beyond which nothing existed. In the starlight, he saw something shimmer in the distance, the frozen pond.

  His foot dropped into a packed-down spot—a tire track.

  He followed it twenty yards to a bare spot in the snow, where the car had obviously been parked until very recently. It was gone now, another set of tracks, fresher ones, running in the opposite direction. In the clear winter air, he thought he could still smell the exhaust, but there was no sign of headlights anywhere in the distance. He was amazed that she’d even been able to find the road, but if anybody could do it—

  Turning back toward the house, Scott felt something bump against his shoulder in the darkness.

  He stopped and looked up.

  It was a foot.

  That’s not what it looks like, his brain gibbered. That can’t be what it looks like, because what it looks like is—

  The wind picked up, and Colette’s body turned slightly on the rope that connected her neck to the tree branch above, her legs dangling at face level. One of her boots had fallen off to expose a stocking-clad foot. The wind had blown her hair into a snow-strewn tangle that fell over one of her eyes but left the other staring glassily down.

  As he looked up at her, Scott felt the ground beneath his feet splintering, shearing off, shifting in two diametrically opposite directions and pulling him with it. On one side was madness; on the other, coherence. He already knew which direction he was tilting toward, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  Yes there is. Pull yourself together.

  That was hilarious. He was losing his mind, skating blindly toward the abyss. It was already too late. Then the wind changed direction, and her face twisted the other way, creaking, though the one revealed eye somehow seemed as if it were still fixed on him. Scott bit his lip, felt his thoughts coming back around, not to normalcy but at least coherence.

  Colette, who did this to you?

  The wind flipped up the bangs of her tangled hair, flashing her other eye. The rope creaked, shifting.

  Or had she done it to herself?

  He stared back at the bare spot where the tire tracks led. Someone had been here—had come across Colette and strung her up, left her strangling, and taken her car, and … and …

  The wind blew. She was turning again, coming back around.

  He had to cut her down.

  Scott forced himself to reach upward toward the body. The rope was knotted just a few feet out of reach. It already looked as if it were coming unraveled, slipping under her deadweight. Without a knife or a saw, and some kind of ladder, he didn’t know how he was going to free her. His mind flashed to all the sharp instruments inside the black wing. What about the kitchen? Wasn’t there something there he could use?

  He put one foot in front of the other and started back toward the house, moving as fast as he could in the snow, and behind him he heard something fall.

  He stopped and looked back.

  The rope had slipped the rest of the way off. She lay in a heap in the snow, the noose still hooked around her throat. Lumbering back to her, bending down, he positioned himself to lift her body and heard—

  what?

  Something. A soft murmur of air escaping from her lungs.

  Scott flinched, stared at her.

  One of her eyelids twitched.

  “Colette—” He started to pick her up again, hesitated—what if her neck was broken?—and realized he was going to have to take that risk. If this had just happened, there was a still a chance of getting her back. “Come on, girl. Come on. Hang in there.”

  Bad choice of words, asshole.

  Straightening her out, Scott laid her on her back and touched her throat, but his fingertips were numb and he couldn’t feel anything. He had to get her back to the house.

  There’s no time.

  CPR training was mandatory at his job—the company got some kind of insurance break for offering it. He tilted her head back and mashed his mouth against her cold lips, the tissue lifeless, blowing two breaths in, then moved down to her chest, hands together, compressing hard thirty times. Something cracked—ribs. He went back to her mouth. Two breaths. Thirty compressions. He checked the pulse, felt nothing, tried to blame it on his numb fingers. How long were you supposed to continue? Until help arrives.

  He breathed. Compressed. Checked for pulse. Felt nothing. No signs of life. In the distance, the wind rose up as if taking a special interest in his failure here, firing snow into his eyes before settling again. Colette stared up at him through eyes that were done seeing.

  But I heard her make a noise. I could have sworn I saw her eyelid move.

  Compressions.

  Breaths.

  Until help arrives.

  That was a good one.

  He kept pumping, already feeling the fatigue settling into his joints, and pushed on anyway. Not because it meant anything but because there was n
othing else to do. The cold was starting to slow him down. He realized there was no way he could have made the long walk back to town.

  After a while, he carried her into the house.

  BY THE TIME HE BROUGHT Colette back into the dining room, fetched a kitchen knife, and cut the rope from her throat, he’d already started thinking of her as the body. When you took away the pulse and respiration, what you were left with was just the body, wasn’t it? And all the Red Cross training in the world couldn’t turn the body back into a person.

  He lowered her down onto the air mattress and took out his cell phone. Still two bars left on the battery, but when he dialed Emergency Services, the screen read:

  NO SERVICE AVAILABLE

  He knelt down and went back to work on her anyway, doing steadily diminished breaths and compressions until his shoulders burned and his muscles felt limp and toneless. In the end, he just stopped. Nobody could blame him for that. There was no longer any question about heart rate or respiration. After a certain point, you simply stopped, because it was just you, you were all alone, and you couldn’t do any more.

  Covering the body with the sleeping bag, he picked up the phone, dialed 911, and waited.

  And waited.

  His mind yammered with questions. Who had done this to her? If she’d killed herself, why, and why tonight? What had prompted her to go through with it here at the house? What happened to the car?

  NO SERVICE AVAILABLE.

  He couldn’t stop looking at the purple bruise that had formed around her neck, like the tattoo of a necklace. Finally dragging his eyes away, he walked back to the dining room, where the sleeping bag lay draped over the shape on top of the air mattress. Kneeling down, he lifted the sleeping bag from Colette’s face and forced himself to look down at her open eyes. One of her hands had fallen out and lay palm-up on the floor as if in beggar’s supplication. Her lips were parted enough that he could see her tongue. The corpse would be heavy, he knew, and he still wasn’t sure that carrying her out of the house was the right thing to do. He stayed there for what seemed like a long time listening to the snowflakes tick against the windows, pressing to the glass like a thousand eyes.

  Gazing down at the upturned hand, he took his first real look at the scar on the inside of the wrist. He noticed now that the flesh had been cut in the shape of a crucifix, that Colette must have cut down and then made a shorter line across. When had she done that, how long ago? Had that been her first attempt, or were there others that hadn’t left so obvious a sign? Who had saved her that time—or had she cut herself and then called the ambulance as soft pink clouds formed in the warm bathwater around her?

  Scott touched the scar, found himself tracing the path of it with his index finger.

  What if she sat up right now and grabbed me?

  He reared back, utterly unnerved by the thought. Suddenly he didn’t want to be in the same room with the corpse, not tonight in this house. Standing up, he made a deal with himself: He would walk once around the first floor, considering his options, and if he didn’t come up with anything better, he’d wrap her up and carry her out on foot. Maybe cell phone reception would be better once he got closer to the highway.

  He backed out of the room, unable to look away from her face. Too late he realized that in his haste to get away, he’d neglected to cover her face again. He could feel the dead eyes on him, their blank and accusatory stare. In the foyer, out of sight, he felt slightly more stable and, almost without thinking, took out the cell phone and hit redial for the sheriff’s office, already thinking how he would handle getting her out of here. Bundling her in the sleeping bag would help, he thought. Maybe if he didn’t have to look at her face—

  The line was ringing. He was connected.

  “Sheriff’s office.”

  “This is Scott Mast again, I need to talk to the sheriff.”

  The sigh from the other end was audible even with the imperfect signal. “I’m sorry, Mr. Mast, but the sheriff—”

  “I’ve got a dead body here.”

  He could feel the receptionist’s voice processing this. “What was that?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Hold on.”

  While he waited, Scott walked from the foyer to the first-floor landing and looked up the long staircase. He hadn’t been upstairs in days. In fact, there were rooms in the house, locked and unlocked, that he had never seen—probably dozens of them. Whatever secrets they contained would remain a secret, at least from his eyes. His mother’s epitaph came into his mind: In my father’s house are many mansions.

  “Mr. Mast? What the hell’s going on out there?” Sheriff Mitchell’s tone of impatience now bordered on rage. “What’s this about a corpse?”

  “I found her hanging from a tree,” Scott said quickly, not minding how the words ran together. “I tried to bring her back, to resuscitate her, but …”

  “A suicide?” Even Mitchell’s anger couldn’t hide the distinct impression of a man who’d abruptly found himself out of his depth. “Do you know the identity of the victim?”

  “Colette McGuire.”

  “Oh.” Then he heard Mitchell murmur in a low voice, to nobody in particular, “Oh shit. Are you sure?”

  “I’ve got her here,” Scott said. “I brought her into the house. I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve been trying to call, but my cell phone couldn’t get service in this weather.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Round House, an old house outside of town. If you go north off Highway 12—there’s a country road …” Directions failed him, and he thought feverishly: “Where my dad crashed his car.”

  “I know the place,” Mitchell said. “And you’re all by yourself out there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. I’ll come out. It might take me awhile. Just sit tight, okay?”

  Scott nodded. “All right.” He put the cell phone away and sat down on the bottom step to wait.

  AN HOUR WENT BY.

  Without realizing it, he began to pace through the foyer and adjoining hallways, detouring around the far end of the first-floor corridor so that he could avoid the dining room. The dining room was where the body was. He didn’t want to go back there unless he absolutely had to.

  He kept the cell phone cupped in his hand and opened it every few minutes to make sure the battery still held a charge, in case Mitchell was trying to call him back. But the phone didn’t ring.

  He realized that along with trying to avoid the dining room, he’d started trying to avoid touching the house if at all possible. As he paced, he stayed in the middle of the halls to keep away from the slightly curved walls, and he only walked through doorways that he didn’t have to open. He never stopped moving, never sat down, simply continued to circle and glance over his shoulder, checking his cell phone and putting it down again, reentering through the foyer, the hallway, and the kitchen, wishing he could somehow see all of it at once. He tried not to look at the rounded corners where the wall and floor came together, and he didn’t look up.

  The end of the hallway was in sight, the dining room, the gray edge of the air mattress just visible in the corner of the entranceway.

  He turned away.

  It didn’t seem to make a difference. He could still feel her in there half covered by the sleeping bag, head cocked to one side with that bruise around her neck, waiting for him. Why in God’s name hadn’t he simply covered her face?

  Do it now. Just go back in there.

  Instead, he went back to the kitchen and made coffee, but when the black stream trickled into the pot, it came out thick as syrup, too bitter to drink. He pulled out the filter basket and saw that without realizing it, he’d filled it to the top with grounds, and dumped it into the trash, pouring the dregs down the sink. Behind him, in the kitchen doorway, a shape moved against the wall—the shadow of a tree in the porch light probably. He stared at the wall, waiting for it to happen again. It didn’t happen again.

  When his cell phon
e rang, he almost shouted out loud.

  “Hello?”

  “I ought to kick your ass,” the voice on the other end snarled. It was Sheriff Mitchell’s voice, but barely—there was some kind of animal inflection to it. “What the hell do you think this is, Mast, April Fools’ Day?”

  “Sheriff?”

  “Tonight of all nights, to pull this shit. If I weren’t so busy right now I’d drag you off to jail myself.”

  “Hold on,” Scott said. “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Telling me you found Colette McGuire’s body. You think that’s funny? Is that your sick idea of a joke?”

  “Sheriff, I’m not lying. I told you, I’ve got her corpse in my dining room.”

  “Oh yeah? Then maybe you can tell me what she’s doing standing here in my office.”

  Scott couldn’t breathe. He felt the sensation leaving his hands, so that it seemed the phone was hovering next to his ear all by itself. There was a rustle of the receiver changing hands.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice asked. “Scott?”

  He recognized her immediately, at least with the part of his brain that dealt solely with facts. He tried to speak her name and couldn’t get past the first consonant.

  “What’s going on?” Colette said. “Sheriff Mitchell says you called him and told him you found my dead body out there …?”

  Now his entire arm had lost all muscular control. Vaguely, he felt the cell phone slide slowly from his ear. It snagged momentarily on the cuff of his shirt like the prop of some amateur sleight-of-hand artist, then fell to the floor.

  From the far end of the hallway, in the direction of the dining room, he heard a thump.

  IT WAS FOLLOWED by another noise, quieter but more sustained, like someone dragging a pile of heavy, wet rags and rotten leaves across the floor. Scott felt his tonsils swelling, blocking his airway until he couldn’t breathe. Very faintly, from the cell phone that had fallen from his loosely curled fingers, he heard Colette’s voice droning on, saying “Scott …? Scott …?”

  He stayed exactly where he was. He did not want to walk up to the other end of the foyer, through the hallway that gave onto the doorway of the dining room, and find out what that thump had meant. He most definitely did not want to know what the soft slithering sound was, either. And he especially didn’t want to know whether that oak door in the corner of the dining room had been slightly open when he’d been in there last time. He thought it might have been, but now that he considered, he just wasn’t sure.