No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  The coals flickered, and Owen felt someone else enter the room.

  He turned slowly, took a step backward, and fell into a spot where the floor dropped six inches. The thing lunged into the firelight, and all at once, Owen could make out the shape in front of him, a massive figure, as broad as an ox. It was naked except for a stained leather butcher’s apron, his broad shoulders and bare thighs gleaming with sweat. Thick wiry hair matted his flesh and neck like the fur of an animal. Owen’s tongue swelled to clog his throat, and he felt himself lapse into a stupor of broad, toxic, logic-devouring terror. Every other detail of the man’s face was eclipsed by his reddish yellow eyes, far brighter than the stove, so intense that Owen could’ve sworn they somehow shone in the long mirror of the man’s teeth.

  “What the hell …?” he breathed.

  One great hand—it felt like many—seized him by the wrist and yanked him off his feet. Tumbling forward, he flew and hit the ground in one of the stalls, facedown on a bed of rotten hay. A sharp object poked him in the leg, and he looked down to see a long, yellowish white object sticking up, a human rib with a rag of fabric still clinging to it. He drew back. The thing was towering over him, its burnished face split open in peals of silent laughter, laughter that somehow mimicked the flickering coals over the walls. The fire was laughing at him. The thing in the apron was laughing at him. It reached under the leather apron and brought out a long, serrated knife whose tip was split open into two different barbed hooks, turning it over and offering it to Owen.

  Owen took it.

  The thing raised its hand in mocking benediction.

  Owen felt himself bringing the blade to his neck, just beneath his chin. He felt no reluctance, only relief to be doing the thing’s bidding and bringing an end to his own terror. Through madness, fear, and confusion, he recognized that there was only one thing that the giant wanted from him now.

  He jerked the blade toward his throat.

  The tips of the blade bit effortlessly into the skin of his neck, the shock hitting him like a slap, breaking the spell. He recoiled, lowering the knife, letting it fall. Blood trickled from the cut, and he touched it, holding pressure there. The gash was long but not deep, although he could feel his blood leaking out between his fingers, pattering onto the floor below.

  Throughout it all, the naked giant in the leather apron towered in ragged laughter. Owen knew now what this was: the very face of his family’s sickness, the man in black from Grandpa Tommy’s song, a being that had destroyed them all throughout the years and had now come, as he’d always known it would, to destroy him.

  Then, from outside his immediate realm of consciousness, he saw the towering shape straighten up and turn falteringly to the right.

  Owen turned and looked.

  At the other end of the room, a shadow hunched against the glow of the stove. What he saw there was a young girl in a tattered blue dress and, standing next to her, holding her hand, his son, Henry. Owen looked again, willing his dying drunkard’s brain to focus on the details, no matter how unbelievable.

  The girl holding his son’s hand was Colette McGuire.

  “Father,” Colette murmured.

  The giant at the bench began to turn slowly around to face her, its grin stretched into rigid angles, arms spread like an invitation to dance. The voice that came out of it was like no human voice or animal sound Owen had ever heard—a cobblestone rasp mixed with a mulish whinny.

  Clutching his left hand to his throat, pushing down hard on the place where the blade had found its target, Owen put his right elbow against the stall and levered himself into an upright position. The thing that had stood in front of him was gone. Looking out of the stall, he saw that it had gone back to the workbench, next to the stove, that it was doing something over there with the tools.

  “Henry,” Owen tried to say, but in the extremity of his pain, he couldn’t even whisper it. His throat was an abattoir trough of backed-up blood and leakage. All he could do was raise the knife that the thing had given him—he still held it in his hand—and slam it down hard against the damp, blood-soaked wood of the stall in an attempt to get their attention. It made the softest imaginable sound, not really a sound at all, just a dull ache that traveled up through his forearm to his neural plexus, just enough to snuff out his consciousness in a single stroke. Owen’s semiconscious realization, that he should simply have died out there in the woods, should never have wished to see his son again, passed over him with genuine indifference.

  He fell down into the stinking hay and let his eyes sink shut.

  SCOTT TORE THROUGH THE front door of the house without hesitation, down the foyer and through the hallway, the clatter of his own footsteps chasing him back to the dining room. On the floor in front of the air mattress, he saw an old book and read the title: By Dark Hands, by H. G. Mast. Glancing it at now, he felt no sense of surprise or revelation. Mast the elder had been passionate about more than murder. He had heard the call of the arts, and Robert Carver’s curse had taken the form it had because of his ancestor’s passion not just for murder but for the creative act, a shadow that had fallen forward across the decades to envelop the entire family. Scott saw it all now. His run through the woods had been bracing, clearing his mind.

  It’s pointless. You know it is. You said so yourself. There is no end.

  Yes, that was so.

  So what possible difference could any of this make?

  He didn’t have an answer to that. At the moment, he didn’t need one. Already he could feel the noxious cloud of energy gathering in the house around him, the ozone in the air growing stronger and more potent until it culminated in an explosion that would blow the roof off the entire world. Something in here smelled of blood. In the corner of the dining room, he ducked into the hole he’d smashed through the wall, wedging his shoulders deeper, crawling into … not blackness, not anymore, but a strange, creeping orange light.

  He thought of the stove.

  Something had lit it.

  No, not just something.

  It.

  Carver.

  He walked down the black hallway, the narrow wing stretching out before him in an endless offer of soulless oblivion. He kept moving. He thought of the title of the old book: By Dark Hands. And Helping Hands. And his own damaged hands. What was a hand but another kind of wing, reaching forward to embrace, to grasp, strangle, and choke? He had been through all of this before, as had his father and grandfather and great-grandfather; there would be a time and place when he would trade it all in and probably get nothing back. It was pointless to worry now about how it all might have been if he’d never found his father’s attempt to complete the story—if the things he’d aroused by undertaking the project had been allowed to lie dormant. It made no difference now. The light of his laptop had awakened the Carvers again, and all those hours of energy that he’d thought he’d poured into the story had actually been poured into them, nourishing them with his own lifeblood until they could stand up and take nourishment on their own.

  Coming around the corner, he saw what was there and stopped in his tracks.

  In front of him, wearing a shabby blue dress like a slave’s frock, Colette McGuire crouched over the small, prone body of Henry Mast. Scott’s first thought—that she had already killed the boy—was obliterated a moment later when a larger, immeasurably darker form rose towering in front of her. It was garbed in the stained leather apron that Scott had seen hanging by the stove the last time he’d been back here. The thing was unarmed except for the sharp scythe that hung in front of its face, which he realized, with a kind of jolt, was really its grin.

  The scythe-faced thing came forward to put its hands on the boy.

  “No,” Scott said.

  Colette’s head jerked up—showing the pale face of Rosemary Carver. “Scott?” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  The shape of Robert Carver grew brighter in the stove’s light. At the same moment, he unbuckled the leather apron
, allowing it to slide from his torso, allowing Scott to see through the gelid skin for what it was—not one body but dozens of smaller ones knit together in a kind of tapestry of corpses. Carver’s physical incarnation was made up of all the victims who had died here, tortured women and children who had suffered at the hands of Scott’s great-great-grandfather. They clutched at one another, coiled like serpents beneath his skin, their bruised skulls forming Carver’s shoulders, multitudes of bony, broken limbs entwined to give shape to the bulbous arms and legs.

  As one, the victims of H. G. Mast bent forward and reached for Henry. The boy stared up at the creature in wonder, paralyzed but fully lucid, his expression a crosscut slash of terror.

  Scott started forward with the intention of doing anything he could to separate his nephew from the thing, but the moment had come and gone. He’d wasted it on astonishment. Carver swung his arm, and Scott felt the strands of women’s greasy, matted hair, tied together to bind the other bodies, acting as a kind of net, a snare that caught and flung him aside. Scott whipped free. Voices shrieked at him through Carver’s mouth, bellowed, brayed. With an offhand gesture, the thing batted him sideways, and Scott slammed into Colette, both of them sprawling across the packed dirt floor.

  He felt his mind trying to grapple with all that he was witnessing, but there was no room for it. This, then, had been when his father had snapped—bolted from here, headed out to his car and the stretch of road that would ultimately kill him. On the floor beside him, Colette glanced over to read the unspoken question in his face, meeting it with broken hopeless grief. She was only a vessel for Rosemary’s father’s undying rage, just as Scott was its target—no escape for either of them, now or ever.

  The corpses that made up Carver’s body were bending forward, and Scott saw them hefting the wooden trapdoor that he had lifted earlier, starting to stuff the boy inside.

  The pipe, Scott thought, the one that runs down underground and out to the pond—

  At last, Henry seemed to shake himself from his terror enough to struggle against what was happening; he snapped and grappled with the thing, but the hands slithered from within its woven pattern to shove him along. Henry screamed, a rising squeak; Carver roared back at the boy with all the force of the avenged dead. The boy burst into tears. Colette ran toward him and Scott followed; Carver swung one great corpse-woven arm—

  Something flashed in the orange light, and the arm dropped to the floor.

  Scott stared.

  It was Owen.

  SCOTT WATCHED HIS BROTHER come staggering out of one of the stalls, holding a knife in one hand and his throat in the other. He seemed to be wearing a beard of blood, but the wound on his neck wasn’t the most galvanizing thing about his appearance. What struck Scott even more powerfully was the expression in Owen’s eyes, the riveted-together mask of grim determination to accomplish the task that lay before him.

  Without once looking up at Scott or Colette, he dove forward and looped the knife at Carver, burying it in the thing’s side and ripping downward. Bodies avalanched where the blade sheared them away, unfolding over the floor—two women in rags, a third on her haunches, clutching a dead infant and hissing like a scalded cat. The uneven, half-carved tower of corpses that remained teetered toward him, reaching, and Owen lashed out again, punching the blade through its face.

  Carver tumbled backward and fell. More bodies separated, only to scramble back up into place, while others lay blindly where they’d fallen, glaring from a place Scott couldn’t imagine. Carver’s face was laughing at him. He knew something, some secret knowledge he’d held for the last century and a half, the outcome of the battle already decided.

  Still clutching the knife, Owen made a gurgling sound, blood bubbling through his fingers. He dropped the blade and fell to his knees on the floor next to his son, latching on to the boy and hugging him, Henry flinging his arms around his father. Owen picked up the knife again and cut a swath off his shirt, wrapping it around his throat.

  Colette said, “Wait …” Extending her arms, she reached for Henry, and Scott saw her face pulsing back and forth between her familiar features and the bleached and twisted hunger of Rosemary Carver. “… my baby—”

  Owen opened his mouth and closed it, gestured at Scott. “Run. Get out of here. Run.”

  “No.” Scott shook his head. “Not again.”

  Colette screamed, lunging for Henry. Scott moved forward and grabbed her arm. Spinning around, Colette bumped into the open trapdoor, and for a second, Scott held her in open space long enough to see her face become familiar again, realization smoothing her features to a gloss of despair.

  Then she fell.

  CARVER’S LAUGHTER RATTLED like a disintegrating cough throughout the wing, echoed in the mouths of the victims as they slunk back into the shadows, the entire house shaking like a huge set of asthmatic lungs. Scott felt blindness rising to smother him like a cloak. The light in the stove was finally waning, but it didn’t matter; there was less and less to see. Corpses merged into the walls, their tissue blending with the wood and the dirt, absorbed from whence they’d come. Still their eyes burned on him; he felt them like a bed of nails.

  Painstakingly, with monumental effort, Owen had managed to hoist his son up into the crook of his arm. The knife that he’d used to break the bodies apart lay forgotten in the straw. Owen slumped and took a step, then, still holding on to Henry, he glanced back at the trapdoor where Colette had fallen. A sense of realization washed over his face, smoothing it out, making him look both childlike and terribly old.

  Scott forced himself into an upright position and looked at his brother. “Coming …?”

  Owen didn’t answer. From outside, Scott could hear men’s voices and barking dogs approaching, getting louder. His brain was a blur of awareness, and then, when he heard the final peal of laughter inside the wing, he felt sudden clarity. He saw that Owen had let go of his son, but he had picked up the knife.

  “Owen,” Scott said, “come on. Let’s go.”

  “She was trapped like we are.” Owen was still staring at the trapdoor. “It wasn’t her fault.”

  “I know it wasn’t,” Scott said, “but—”

  “Take Henry. Get out of here.”

  Before Scott could answer, Owen dove through the trapdoor.

  OWEN FELT A SHARP, slanting pain, stabbing him from all sides—no air.

  He’d gone spilling and scraping down a rough metal pipe not much bigger than his body, shooting forward on gravity and a glare of ice. It was rough, tearing off scraps of his clothes and skin, and he’d felt little nodules of things clotted to the inside of the pipe as it passed, jagged bones, bits of moldy refuse that hadn’t flushed all the way through. Suddenly the pipe was gone. The knife he’d brought with him had disappeared. In suffocating blackness, he rotated slowly and realized that he had been dumped out in gray, airless space.

  He was underwater.

  The pond.

  He turned his face up, already going numb, and water stung his eyes. Overhead, a semitranslucent slab of ice formed the ceiling of his world. In the dull gray light, he saw vague shadows trampling over him, the muted passage of feet, longer shapes, dogs trundling across the surface, voices fading.

  A hand took hold of his ankle.

  He looked down. Colette stared up at him, hair floating around her face. Owen bent his leg, pulled her upward. She shook her head, expelling bubbles in a rush through her mouth and nose.

  There was no more time. Owen took hold of her arm, kicking toward the ice crust, hitting it with his shoulder. It was like ramming a concrete wall. He struck it again. Adrenaline poured through his system, none of it doing any good. Owen curled downward, bent his legs, and kicked at the surface but only succeeded in driving himself deeper into the water. There was nothing to brace against. Colette looked at him and shook her head again, mouth opening and closing, letting out a few more bubbles, weaker this time.

  It wasn’t her fault.

  Owen swam
at the ice and rammed it headfirst with all his remaining strength. Something cracked—ice, bone, or both. Then a chunk of the bleak sky slipped free and fell on top of him. Thank God. Everything melted into shades of pale gray, and when his vision refocused, the water around his head was clouding red. Owen realized the only reason he could see it was because daylight was filtering down into the water, but that was all right because—

  He groped blindly through the scarlet murk, found Colette’s hand. She raised one arm at him, and Owen told himself this might still work out.

  All he had to do was lift her up through the hole in the ice.

  It should have been easy.

  But he suddenly felt very cold, inside and out. He’d been filling his lungs, but not with air. A thick, congested feeling came over him, heavy and indifferent. Up above, in the cloudy light, Colette’s legs scissored through the hole, struggling to pull free. As she disappeared to the surface, one foot caught and her shoe slipped off.

  Under the ice, Owen watched it fall and realized that he had begun to sink.

  Blackness enveloped him. As it did, the congested feeling in his chest went away, and there was no more pain.

  It felt like nothing.

  All the weight and pain and tiredness, all the fear that he’d worn around like armor throughout the bulk of his adult life was gone, utterly gone, replaced by a feeling of profound peace.

  Twenty feet beneath the frozen surface of the pond, Owen Mast died smiling.

  THE WOMAN ON THE OTHER side of the glass stared out at the man and the boy. Her face was a question mark, echoed by the sheet of paper she held up in both hands.