We might have gone on like this a very long time, until the day when I discovered her body lying facedown in the hall or she discovered mine. Instead, something happened.
*
She would still, despite everything, sometimes leave in search of food. She would go out the first door and be gone an hour, a day. She returned burdened by hunks of bluish flesh or hauling the gooey remains of a carapace.
When I heard her leave the house, as soon as I was sure I was alone, I went out into the hallway and stood by the door, the second door, and pondered opening it. I would stand with my hand on the mechanism, staring out the window into the darkness, staring at nothing, until I heard the sound of the first door opening and my sister returning. Then I would rush back to my room.
Until one day, staring into the darkness, staring at nothing, I realized that there was something out there after all.
*
How long I had been staring, I didn’t know. Long enough to feel as if I were no longer in my body, as if I were nowhere at all. And then something, a flicker or flash of movement in the glass, caught my attention and brought me back.
It was, I thought at first, the reflection of my face, the ghost of my own image caught in the glass and cast back at me. As I moved my own face slightly, smiled, inclined my head, the ghostly image in the glass reacted just as expected. It was only when I settled again, stared out again, motionless, that I realized the flicker was still there.
I held very still. It was there, deep in the darkness beyond the glass, drawn perhaps to this face (my own) it saw through the glass. I waited. I watched and waited.
And yes, there, it was, features nearly aligned with my own reflection. There was barely anything there, and yet there was something there.
*
By the time my sister returned, I was back in my room, turning over what I had seen. A face, almost like my own but not quite my own, nearly submerged in the murk. I had the dolls—my sister had abandoned them in my room and had not retrieved them after her voice was transformed—and with these I played out what had happened.
The doll that had been my father I designated as me. He walked down the long, cylindrical hall, in the trough formed between my legs by the dip of the blanket. Halfway down, at the hall’s knee, the doll stopped and looked out the thick circular window set in the door. Did he see anything? No, he did not. Or did he? He wasn’t sure, he almost turned away, and then suddenly—
There, pushing up against the blanket from beneath, the other doll, the one who had been my mother. What was it now? The doll that was me couldn’t make her features out through the blanket, not clearly, but he knew that something was there, something roughly human in form.
It was just a question of how to coax her out from the darkness.
*
A number of days passed before my sister went outside again. I waited impatiently, hardly leaving my room, afraid to show too much interest in the second door while my sister was still inside. But then at last, finally, she left.
I rushed immediately to the second door, peering out into the darkness. I waited. Nothing was there. And then, suddenly, though I could see little more than my own reflection, I felt something was. “Hello?” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”
Nothing changed or moved, not a thing.
“Please,” I said, “let me see you.” But as I said it I realized that I didn’t need to see to know. That something, an idea, had already begun to coalesce in my mind.
And just like that, I knew who it was.
3.
When my sister, or rather the being that had taken the place of my sister, returned to the first door, it found it locked. I had locked it from the inside. It pounded on the door, crying out in that language that was not a language. Though I could not understand a word of what it said, or even be sure that what it said was words, I knew what it wanted: to get in. It had killed my sister and taken her shape, her manners, her gestures, her whole being, but something had slipped and it could not take her speech. If I hadn’t sensed my true sister, the dead one, floating in the darkness behind the glass, I would have never known.
I let the creature pound. It would not get in. Not again.
*
It is still there, still pounding, its face crusted with frost. I see it in those brief moments when I tear myself away from the second door. It has been there for days now. I know what it wants—its gestures are clear enough. Open the door, they say, open the door!
And yes, I have come to believe this is something I should do: open the door. Only not the door it desires me to open.
*
In my bed I play with the dolls. My father is no longer my father: he is me. My mother is no longer my mother: she is my sister. Not the pretender: the real one. The male doll goes down the hall and stops to stare through the dark window set in the door. He sees something. Or not sees exactly: senses. He is sure something is there. Or rather someone. Impossible, since she is dead, but somehow still there nonetheless. He waits, and watches, and then he initiates the procedure. He arms the door. The countdown begins, lights flash, an alarm sounds. And then, after a moment, he is free to throw the lever and open the door and join his real sister. There she is, billowing out of the darkness, her head torn off, coming toward him.
*
I record this in a language that I, at least, can understand, having as I do no other. Whether anyone else will come who can understand remains to be seen. Though not by me: I am going to step out into the dark side of our house that is not a house. I am going to rejoin my sister. The real one. The one who is dead.
I will not be coming back.
Or rather, when I do come back, as soon as I open my mouth to speak, you will know it is not me.
NADIA BULKIN
Live Through This
A month after Danielle Haas was buried, the cemetery caretaker Mr. Wolf was found dead on the grounds with a rake in his hand and an awful look on his face like he’d just seen the Devil, or so the rumor went at school. Everybody was so convinced that he’d met the ghost of Lady Horn—the wife of the town’s founder, an insane woman buried in Plot 9—that nobody noticed that Danielle’s body was missing until it turned up a week later in the Roths’ living room, cold and clean and stiff-as-a-board, though not light-asa-feather. The Roths surrendered her to the morgue, which then held onto the body during a slow and meandering sheriff’s investigation into possible grave tampering, and thirty days later the coroner Dr. Arnold was found dead in her office, looking just as wretched as Mr. Wolf, and Danielle was gone again.
By the time Danielle showed up on the floor of the Neumanns’ lemon-fresh kitchen, people had figured out what was going on. There was a four-hour town meeting for the grown-ups in the high school auditorium, and the older kids watched the younger ones over pizza and candy, by turns scared and excited because they were finally getting a taste of true adults-only Emergency. Tegan Sauer had just read The Giver and was sure they were on the verge of undergoing a terrible communal transformation from which she and her brother Emory would have to rescue everyone.
“So what are we going to do?” Emory asked when their mother came home from the meeting, looking exhausted and sniffly in her oversized all-weather jacket.
“We’re going to share the burden,” their mother said, filling a glass of water so she could take her usual clatter of pills. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“What do you mean, share the burden?”
“We’re all going to chip in and take in Danielle for a month.”
Upset worked its way into Emory’s face. “It’s not our fault that she killed herself, that was Jon Richter and Matty Böhm. Everybody knows that.” Those two were always in and out of school, taking days off to talk to their lawyers, trying to settle with Danielle’s family outof-court. Their neighbor who sometimes drove their mother to work after heavy snowstorms said that the case against the two boys was so weak that they never would have been able to convict them in criminal
court, and if Danielle hadn’t killed herself there would have been no civil suit either. It’s really sad, but they shouldn’t have to pay just because she was unbalanced, he said. There’s a lot of pressure on young girls to be popular these days, he added, looking at Tegan meaningfully, as if to tell her not to follow in those footsteps, to stay good and sweet.
“Because we’re not that kind of town,” said their mother. “Besides, this way it’ll be under control, not some random … freak accident.” She had been friends with Dr. Arnold since their father died in a random freak accident on an icy road on Valentine’s Day. The two women used to go out on the back porch to drink wine, and their mother usually ended up crying.
“So we all have to live with a corpse for a month? One that can apparently kill us?”
“No one’s going to die, I told you,” their mother said, shutting off the kitchen light. In the dark she was just another pillar in a Roman temple. “That’s why we’re doing this, so nobody dies. Now upstairs, both of you. Chop, chop.”
Tegan had that stuck in her head until dawn: the murder-corpse going Chop chop.
“She needs to have her revenge,” said Gabby Schultz, as they watched Amy Neumann eat carrot sticks across the cafeteria. The body was staying with the Neumanns through the end of the month, and Amy Neumann had already been guaranteed a passing grade for the quarter. “You know she’s doing this because her spirit is so angry.”
“What do you think it’s like, having her body in the house with you? Isn’t she decaying?”
“Ask Amy,” said Gabby, and just then Amy Neumann turned her head and stared at them with shiny blue eyes like frozen ponds.
Immediately, they closed their mouths.
Everyone was holding their breath for the Neumanns to die before their 30th day with the body, but they didn’t. The funeral home came to pick up the body in the only hearse in Iram’s Mill and drove Danielle to her next stop: the Franke newlyweds, who lived out by the long-closed lumber factory and had so little room that they had to put her coffin in their would-be nursery. Amy Neumann started laughing again, but she also had some choice words for the boys of Iram’s Mill that she shared during a Halloween sleepover.
“It wasn’t just Jon and Matty,” Amy whispered. “There were other boys at that party.”
The other seventh-grade girls leaned in hard. “Who?” they asked, but Amy just shrugged.
“She didn’t say who.”
The thought of other boys terrified Tegan. She had reconciled herself with the thought of Jon and Matty, two senior football players with abrasive laughs and the tendency to sneer, raping a sixteen-yearold girl at a party. She knew Emory was scared of Jon and Matty because they were in charge of hazing the younger players and Emory once came home from one of their parties drunk and bleeding and covered in bruises. She could imagine Jon and Matty being bad. But how much bad could one town have? She was left scrutinizing every house on her newspaper route, wondering, was it someone here? What about Gabby’s stepbrother? What about Emory’s friends? What about Emory?
“Did you know Danielle Haas?” she asked him while they were playing Call of Duty on one of the few nights he didn’t have football practice. Since Jon had gotten kicked off the team, Emory had moved up on the roster, even earned a little bit of playing time.
“Kind of,” he said. “But not really. She was a year older than me.”
“Were you at that party? Did you see what happened?”
Emory stared at her. “What are you saying? You think I did something to her?”
Tegan couldn’t look at him. She just kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading.
“You know me, Tigger. You know I wouldn’t do that. Dad would probably come back from the dead to kill me if I did.” He made a little scoffing sound, and Tegan giggled despite how morbid it was. It was nice to think of it that way, like their father was just suspended in extended hibernation mode, and if he got upset enough, he would come back and fix things.
After the Frankes had their month with Danielle the funeral home took her to the widow Norma Stein, who lived alone. Gabby joked that maybe Norma liked having someone around, even if she was dead. Word had it that Norma was buying twice her normal groceries, cooking elaborate dinners for the corpse, even buying Danielle new dresses. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad. Anyway, Gabby turned out to be right, because on Norma’s 29th day with Danielle she locked the doors and boarded up the windows and wouldn’t let anyone in. By the time the fire truck came and broke down the door, Norma was dead, and Danielle was gone.
“Well, Mrs. Stein was very sick,” said Tegan’s mother. “And very lonely.” And she let out an enormous sigh, because she was also sick and lonely, and because Tegan couldn’t do anything about any of these things, she just took her bike and pushed it to supersonic speeds, pushed it past Tinker Park, past the town limits, pushed it to the moon.
*
It was another two years before Danielle came to stay with the Sauers. After she killed Norma she was gone for three months, and the First Shepherd Church had just held a triumphant sermon likening Iram’s Mill to some sinful Biblical city that had begged for forgiveness and been spared God’s wrath when Danielle showed up again, this time in the mayor’s bedroom. After that the churches stopped fighting it— God works in mysterious ways, and all that—and the mayor released a statement on the perils of bullying, claiming it was up to the town to make sure neither Danielle’s “beautiful smile” nor her “very important” message were forgotten. He didn’t mention Jon Richter or Matty Böhm or the cops or the courts; that was water under the bridge.
Danielle arrived in a coffin, but Tegan snuck a peek at her on her second night in the laundry room. Even two years after death she was perfectly preserved. With her glossy black ringlets and her milk-white skin, she looked like Snow White. She was pretty. Only her nails were out of control: long witchy talons, looking sharp enough to scrape. Staring at her filled Tegan’s head with a gentle but insistent buzz, like a cloud of gnats near a summer lake. Before she knew it the sky was turning light and her mother was banging around upstairs, and Tegan had spent the entire night with Danielle. She didn’t even remember how she ended up with her hand on Danielle’s bony shoulder, as if trying to console a friend having a nightmare.
“That’s totally creepy, Tigger,” Emory said as they drove to school. He was a senior now, and thought he knew a lot about the world. “The body might have diseases on it, you know.”
“Is that what you said about her, when she was still alive? That she was diseased? Because she was a slut, she was diseased?”
Emory sighed. “Jesus, Tig. I told you I didn’t really know her.” They stopped at a light and some of his teammates pulled up next to him, revving their Mustang’s engine, teasing him for not boning Sara Klein at the party last weekend when she was soooo hammered and soooo begging for it, yelling that they wanted to race down Jefferson Street—or are you a pussy?
“Takes one to know one, fuckhead,” Emory yelled back, and they guffawed, and it was all in good fun, because they had each other’s backs and they were brothers-in-arms and Sara Klein was nothing but a piece of ass, something between a one and a ten, some kind of farm animal. Tegan wasn’t born yesterday. She knew what she was becoming.
Emory saw her clenching her stomach in pain and asked if she was okay. “Those guys are losers,” he added. “They’re nothing. You know that.”
“They’re your friends,” she said.
“I don’t get to pick my teammates,” he said, but of course that was a lie, because he could have chosen not to be their teammate, but everyone said Emory was too good, and a positive influence on the team, and talent shouldn’t be wasted, and maybe he could even get a scholarship somewhere, maybe. She had been to his games; she had seen the love that the town showered on him when he completed a touchdown pass, as if he had just invented the cure for cancer. Gabby said that he was adorable, and Tegan wondered if Danielle had ever innocentl
y sat on the bleachers with a bag of popcorn thinking Jon Richter was so adorable, Jonny the Football Hero.
That day she got into a fight with Kevin Roth because he was always kicking her chair in Computer Lab. He called her a dyke and she called him a loser, the way Emory’s teammates were losers, and he kept saying dyke dyke dyke until she was forced to deny it just to make him stop. The incompetent teacher finally called for order, but during passing period Kevin yelled that the only way she could prove she wasn’t a dyke was if she came over and sucked him off. Before Tegan could respond—that she would bite it off if she got the chance—Emory was right there, slamming Kevin into a locker, saying if you ever talk to her like that again I’m gonna make sure you never talk again, maggot. Only then, with his sneakers dangling a full foot off the floor, did Tegan realize how small Kevin was.
“It’s awesome you have him to protect you,” Gabby said jealously, and she was right.
Emory was given in-school-suspension for attacking a freshman, but he never whined, never blamed Tegan. She thanked him for standing up for her and he said glumly that he shouldn’t have had to in the first place. “It’s always the fucking shrimps that talk the most shit,” he said. Her mother wasn’t mad at Emory either. “You shouldn’t be so hard on your brother,” she said to Tegan. “He’s one of the good ones, you know.”
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 34
