The Deep Hours of the Night

by Jonathan Schlosser

  “This is the end, Caitlyn, that all the signs were pointing too. God has resurrected his saints, those that he loves.”

  It couldn’t be.

  “This is the end of times. The sinners have been separated from the lambs.”

  “No,” Caitlyn breathed. “Please, no.”

  Gannon looked back to her, the shadows on his face like patches of night. The candles flickered, just two now in lonely worship. The smoke was thicker than it should have been, like burning tar, filling the room. “Yes,” Gannon said. “Yes.”

  And he was still smiling.

  Sarah

  1

  Sarah’s teeth fell out in her sleep. It wasn’t one of those things where she knew. She didn’t wake up, screaming and clawing at her mouth. She didn’t feel a burst of pain or even a tingle – nothing so much as a jolt of electricity from a 9-volt battery, if one was to lick the prongs. She didn’t have any feeling that it had happened at all, save for the light pressure of the teeth, all five of them, lying on her tongue.

  Her face, of course, was covered in blood. She could feel that, too, like week-old makeup left to dry and clog all her pores.

  She spit the teeth out into her hand. They were small and white and didn’t weigh very much. She stared at them for a moment, that longest of moments between breaths, and it felt like the entire house fell all around her. Those teeth, perfectly white and perfectly out of place. They looked like popcorn, she thought, very small pieces of popcorn. Then she began to scream.

  2

  There are always secrets; it’s the heart of everything that is wrong with the world. Sarah’s secret was that she was disobedient, which wasn’t so uncommon after all. But it was more complicated than that. Her other secret, her real secret, was that she had found her grandmother’s body in the attic. That secret was so huge, so dark, so all-encompassing that she didn’t even know how to put it into words. So she didn’t, and that solved everything.

  Until her teeth fell out, that was.

  No one was home, a fact that at first felt horrific and then so very fortunate. Because if someone had come to find her, caked in blood and holding her own teeth and talking about finding a body, they would have taken her in. Whether to the Carson Police Department or the Gaviston Insane Asylum hardly made any difference. She would have ended up in both places eventually, in whatever order, and she would have spilled the whole story. About her grandmother, about the eyes, and about the tiny rip in the air. And that would have been enough to have her locked away, if whatever was behind those eyes didn’t kill her first.

  She screamed for an hour or so before she passed out. It was a combination of shock and dread and a lack of oxygen (screaming drains one’s lungs like nothing else) and it did the trick. When she awoke, a bit later, she was able to keep the screams down. She had to swallow them and it was like swallowing glue, but she was able.

  Barely.

  She folded her fingers around the teeth, carried them into the bathroom, and looked at herself. She stood like that, seeing those burning eyes in her mind. And seeing the blood, but that was secondary. Then she shook both off (washing the blood) and put the teeth in the little glass that she’d always used for her toothbrush before. This was a similar purpose, she thought, and fitting.

  It was then, with everything taken care of, that she began to plan. To think. Because all secrets come with plans, whether we know it or not. We make them alone, in the dark, as we try to fall asleep. Most of them involve lies, some of them involve running, and a very small amount involve further action. Action such as burning down a house without first leaving it. Sarah’s plan contained all three.

  3

  In 1998, just after the football season closed and all those people died in the snowstorm in the mountain’s foothills, Sarah’s grandmother had disappeared. It wasn’t said where she’d gone, but it was assumed. Sarah had been seven and not interested in asking further questions. Her parents told her that her grandmother had left, and she’d accepted it for what it was. Accepted it as a white lie from her father and the death of someone she loved.

  Most people think children forget, and this is not at all true. They remember, it seems, better than anyone else. Their memories can be mixed up in the early years, a jumbled package of thoughts that are interwoven and separate all at the same time, but they do remember.

  That was how, when Sarah found her grandmother’s body in the attic, she knew who she was. It was an intellectual knowing, the kind where one doesn’t doubt, even for a moment. She knew and she wasn’t able to breathe both for the fear and the dust. She just stared, lips apart, teeth still fully in her mouth and yawning away from each other like the edges of a violent fault line.

  The body was white, bloodless. Embalmed and rotten. She could see it though what looked like a rip in the very air. It was as if the air had become a tent, the kind to hold circuses beneath. The canvas had been torn and what lay behind was a vast, deep darkness like the void between stars. The body floated there, standing on something Sarah couldn’t see, and it was her grandmother.

  And then she’d seen the eyes. Too old to believe such things and yet too young to discredit them, she’d blinked. Then again. Then rubbed at her contacts (perhaps it was a trick of the light, that dim bulb hanging on a string; perhaps she’d gotten dust on the lenses). But the eyes had stared, burning in her grandmother’s face like the wicks of candles lit around Christmas.

  They had spoken, and yet they hadn’t. No words, no verbal communication, had been exchanged. And yet Sarah had heard her grandmother all the same, speaking in her mind. It sounded like she was at the bottom of a well, the words echoing their way up the ancient stone walls and finally breaking to the surface. But Sarah could understand them just fine.

  Sarah’s father had killed her. That was what her grandmother had said in that rasping voice of the very old. Her own son. Killed her by switching her medication, knowing she was too blind to really see it. He’d killed her because the hospital was the next step and the insurance wasn’t enough. Not with the economy sloping ever downward and the job market following closely. Not with all the ailments she had contracted, all the pills she needed to take. He, Sarah’s father, hadn’t wanted to shell out money just to string his mother along until her inevitable death. It had seemed a waste; just prolonging a life of lying in bed, watching reruns and eating baby food. So he’d accepted her death, switched her pills, and made it happen.

  Belief is hardest when things are true. It’s a fact that, in itself, is hard to swallow. But a fact nonetheless. And Sarah knew – knew – that what her grandmother said was true. It had that ring, that feel. And, of course, her corpse was speaking it, with her eyes burning like candles. That was something that had never happened to Sarah before, and she was inclined to believe the story for that alone.

  Kill him, her grandmother had said.

  Kill her own father.

  And Sarah, believing or otherwise, had disobeyed.

  4

  Oedipus killed his father in order to marry his mother. Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892, with an axe. Dipendra killed most of his family, including his father, at a royal dinner in 2001, in Nepal. But Sarah, despite her instructions, could not kill hers.

  So she kept the secret. She swallowed it just like she would later swallow her screams, holding it in and holding it down. She stayed out of the attic and inside her room, usually with the door locked. Her family thought it was a phase; they waited for it to pass.

  Sometimes, at night, she thought she saw those eyes in the darkness. She thought she saw the rip in the air, darker even than the night, with her grandmother crouching just beyond it. In another world that looked nothing like the heaven and hell painted on the walls of Sarah’s church. She thought she heard her grandmother’s voice working its way up out of that well, asking her, pleading with her.

  She closed her eyes. She turned on the radio. She forced herself to forget it and
to go back to sleep. It worked, for a time. Most things are that way, and most things fail in the end.

  The threats began with her death, which was too far. Her grandmother cursed her, told Sarah she would come for her, told Sarah she would kill her. But it was empty and they both knew it, because her grandmother still needed her. And, Sarah reasoned, her grandmother couldn’t kill, not on her own. Her father, after all, was still very much alive.

  So she ignored it. She was growing ever better at that, and for a time she thought it had worked.

  Then the threats changed. Because she couldn’t kill Sarah, her grandmother had said, but she could hurt her. Oh yes. She could do things from the other side, things that would be so much worse than death. This too, Sarah had ignored. If one threat had been empty, logic ran that they all would be. That one statement would match the other.

  Then, on a morning when no one was home, Sarah’s teeth fell out.

  5

  Sarah was able to keep from screaming again only because she was trying to keep her nerves from snapping. She could feel them going like an old rope, an anchor line in a storm. Strand by strand, they were breaking away. Five at a time, even, one for each tooth. But she couldn’t let them all go yet. No; that wouldn’t do. Because there was one thing left. Her plans contained all three: the lies, the running, and the further action. The burning.

  She wrote an email, then sent it to her father. His computer would be destroyed in the fire, so he wouldn’t get it for at least a day. By then it would be too late. The letter was short, to the point, and a complete lie. It told him that she’d gone down to the lake for a day with her friends. It told him that they would be camping that night. It told him that she loved him.

  The next two blurred together. Because the action would be a sort of running, the only sort she could do if she wanted to get anywhere. If she wanted to be safe. So she got the gasoline from the garage, the matches from the kitchen, and the rope from the shed out back. There was rope in the attic, as well, but she wouldn’t so much as look at it. Not now. Not there.

  The teeth had been white, she remembered, the blood licked off of them while she slept. White like little pieces of popcorn. She wanted to forget and couldn’t and the anchor line lost a few more strands.

  She tied herself to the bed. The rope was strong and wouldn’t break no matter how hard she threw herself against it. She tied the knots so that she couldn’t get them apart, running across the room to pull them tight. She ran until there was no room left; the rope around her ankles took her feet out and the rope around her wrists flipped her onto her back hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. But the knots were tight, and that was what mattered.

  The gasoline was easier. She poured it all across the bed, then the walls. To make sure that the fire spread, that it climbed up that yellow wallpaper and got to the ceiling and got through the walls and into the other rooms. And the attic, of course; she did it to make sure it got to the attic.

  Her teeth had fallen out in a neat little row, all five right from the front. Just fallen out, and they wouldn’t be the last. If her teeth could go, her arms could be next. Or her eyes, perhaps. Her grandmother had some power here; that much, Sarah knew. And it was more than the power of speech. She could take any part, and Sarah couldn’t stand any more. Any more and she really would snap, and then she’d be just like Oedipus or Lizzie or Dipendra.

  She sat down on the bed. It wouldn’t be the glorious death of monks, burning in the streets. It wouldn’t be the remembered death of martyrs, burning on poles in Europe for all to see. But it would be the greatest death, because it would save another. And that should be worth it, would be worth it, had to be worth it.

  The gasoline would be enough, Sarah thought. This much, all around her. Especially if her father had the email and didn’t expect her to be inside. The gas would burn hot and fast and consume all of her and all of the ropes and no one would ever know. The secret would be kept, the secret too horrible to put into words, and things would work out. Wasn’t that what her father had always preached? That things worked out, one way or another, for good?

  She could have hated him, she knew. But the truth is hardest to accept when one knows it is the truth, and she wouldn’t do it. She believed her grandmother and yet wouldn’t let herself believe. Because her father was her father, and he couldn’t have done something so terrible.

  Couldn’t have.

  Couldn’t have.

  Could.

  Sarah lit a match. The anchor line was so thin now, so thin it was almost breaking. And she was almost believing, almost believing her grandmother. The gas fumes were around her, thick like fog rolling in across the lake. They were thick like syrup when the year grew late and the air grew cold. Thick like the steam from a shower that has been turned on and forgotten.

  Thick enough, Sarah thought.

  Thick enough.

  The match fell, and the smoke was thicker still. Sarah’s screams, this time, were not alone. They were accompanied by a perfect twin, a perfect harmonic, that seemed to come from the attic as the flames lapped at the walls, and rose.

  Shards of Glass

  Jackson watched the blood run over his hands, feeling his pulse beat weakly at the wrists, and wished he had never met Gerald Bonderman.

  Of course, when you got down to it, he never really had.

  November latched onto upstate Michigan with bitter teeth, bringing early snows and colds winds harsh enough to burn the skin. Jackson had watched most of the storm from indoors, not venturing out unless he had to. Which he rarely did. He’d moved to the small town of Harrison just two months before, with a little over two million in the bank and no friends or family members to speak of. He’d bought the old house on the corner of Elm and Mason with hard cash, much to the surprise of the real estate agent, and had the money to have most things shipped directly to his door. Fresh food was the only exception, but he managed to do his shopping in the early morning, when no one was around. The packaged stuff, he had the UPS driver drop off at the door, buying it in small enough amounts that he would never need to sign.

  He slumped against the wall, his head leaning back just under the third-story window. He could hear a snowplow ambling down Elm, its blade scrapping against hard-packed snow and breaking through to the pavement. Wind whistled through the cracks in the front of the house; a cold draft knifed at Jackson’s ankles.

  In the shadows, he knew he’d find Gerald. Jackson cursed and sucked in a weak breath. “Why? Can I at least ask you why?”

  The hall he sat in ran along the front wall from one end of the house to the other, and the rooms across from him lay silent and shrouded in darkness. Jackson saw a dim shape floating within the nearest one, something like the head and shoulders of a person, and heard faint laughter drift out on the air. “You can.” The words crossed his mind, though he didn’t hear them in the usual sense. An audio recorder would have picked up nothing more than the wind, had he thought to have one running.

  “Then give me an answer!”

  “You won’t like it.” The shape shimmered across the doorway again, disappearing into the deeper shadows in the corner of the room.

  “As if I like this.” Jackson’s eyes dropped to the jagged glass at his feet. A minute ago the pieces had been full, together, and filled with water. But the glass had been plucked from his hands as he watched the snowplow come up the street and smashed itself to pieces against the wall. And then those pieces, oh those pieces.

  His throat still hurt from his own screams. Jackson shifted his hands to wrap his fingers more tightly around his wrists. The blood poured out, strangely warm in the crisp air, without abating in the least.

  “Jackson?” The voice sounded concerned, almost frightened.

  “What?”

  “You won’t hate me, will you? Don’t you understand? I had to. I had to.”

  Jackson grunted and let his head fall to the side. He felt weaker than he had since taking a shotgun blast to the ca
lf while small game hunting with his brother. They’d been ten, his brother had still been alive, and it had been purely an accident. Thomas had thought he’d seen a rabbit, spun, and fired. The pellets shredded Jackson’s muscle and tore his skin away like wrapping paper. He’d lost a lot of blood, but Tommy had pulled him out of the woods in time for the doctors to save Jackson’s life.

  He closed his eyes. But a car crash had taken Tommy, not two hours after a faulty electrical socket had burned down his parents’ house with them still inside. Jackson, twelve years old, found himself completely and utterly alone.

  “You won’t hate me?”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Promise? Give me an eye-clench.”

  Sighing and wondering how long he had left, Jackson winked at the room. An eye-clench, their own personal jargon. Jackson had said that the wink looked like the eye clenching as if it were a fist instead. Gerald, trapped forever in his child’s mindset, had loved it.

  “You couldn’t have waited?” Jackson pushed with his feet, propelling himself a bit further upright; he’d begun to slide to the floor. He figured he’d end up there eventually, but not yet. “I’m seventy-three, Gerald, and I eat nothing but frozen pizzas and cans of Budweiser. I couldn’t have lasted much longer.”

  The shape in the far room froze, though it seemed to shift as if with nervous anticipation. It wavered slightly, back and forth, back and forth. “It’s so long. Too long. And I thought–”

  Jackson swallowed, barely getting the mouthful of saliva down his throat. “You thought what, Gerald?”

  “I thought you might leave.”

  With a laugh, Jackson held one of his hands up to look at the cut on the wrist. He wiped some of the blood away; the meat below was a darker shade of red, a deep shade that reminded him of uncooked steak. “No chance of that now.”