by Laird Barron
He had made the mistake, and not just once, of watching videos on the Internet of beheadings by Middle Eastern terrorists and by Mexican drug cartels. Morbid curiosity, he supposed, some kind of masochistic fascination. Masochistic, because these videos had horrified and depressed him. And they had frustrated him, too, because not once did he see one of these victims really fight back, spit or curse at his executioners, kick at them or struggle much. But now he understood what they had been feeling. That clubbed sensation. Dazed, waiting for the coup de grace. Breaking the neck off the bottle was only an afterthought. The soul had already been voided.
Another dumb sensation niggled at him. He realized he had to urinate.
“Stupid cow,” he chuckled, speaking to his own body. He realized a tear dribbled down one cheek. He wiped it away on the back of his hand, and turned toward his bathroom. He took one of the candles with him, along with the flashlight, figuring he’d leave that candle burning in the bathroom when he was done. The other candle he left on the kitchen counter.
As he started around the corner of the kitchen wall, into the tiny hallway that ended at his fire escape door, the kitchen went dark behind him.
The candle had been snuffed out, just in the time it had taken him to turn his back on it. Had the wick drowned in the liquefied wax cupped in the top of the candle? Or had the candle ceased to exist?
These questions fired through his brain in the merest fraction of a second. He didn’t look back. His only instinct was to thumb his flashlight on and dive into the bathroom. Inside, he hastily set down the remaining candle on the sink, then slammed the door shut behind him. He turned the lock in the knob.
Then, however much he had been philosophically ruminating on his fatalism, he still squatted down and searched under the sink until he uncovered the other roll of duct tape.
He commenced sealing off the bathroom door. Well, why not? These pitiful impulses toward survival were just more dumb physical urges, like wanting to drink and to pee. Let the poor cow go through its motions. He pitied it, as if he were an entity apart from it.
With the four sides of the door patched over, he set the tape aside and stood there facing it. Was this the last little cube of humanity, this room? The final cell for the last human soul? A toilet. How ignoble, he thought. How fitting.
While he was waiting he might as well empty his bladder, so he did. He didn’t flush the bowl, though; didn’t want to make undue sound. Candlelight reflected on the water standing in his tub. It was like the surface of some pond at night. Mellow. Calming. He sat down on the closed lid of his toilet. He stared at the water. He thought of Jordan Pond.
His candle flickered for one instant, as if a breeze he couldn’t feel were passing across it, and then the flame was extinguished.
He wanted to jump to his feet, but he didn’t think his legs would support him. Though he held no religious beliefs, Anderson whispered, “Oh God.”
He thumbed the switch of the flashlight. It was as if the batteries had died. There was no beam.
The blackness was absolute. Was this what it felt like, then, to be swallowed as that woman’s husband, Enrique, had been? And yet he still drew air into his lungs. He was still conscious of his body. Was this how he was to spend eternity? Not tortured by demons, but locked alone in a little room? Not the acute agonies of Hell, but a subtler kind of suffering? The suffering of being apart . . . disconnected? Now that the end had come for his kind—for whatever reason, if there needed to be a reason for an ant hill to be trampled—would every soul be caged in its own tiny cell, isolated from every other soul? Though in a way, hadn’t it always been that way? Each of them caged in the cells of their bodies?
Then Anderson became aware that he could see the door in front of him. Dimly, but he could just make it out in the murk. The silvery duct tape even seemed to be reflecting a soft radiance. He could see his hands, gripping his knees as he sat there on the toilet lid.
Anderson stood up, turned and faced the source of the strengthening glow.
He was face-to-face with a screen of silent, seething static. Gray and white and black pixels, dancing like agitated subatomic particles. But this was not his TV screen, nor even his computer screen. This field of shimmering static was the mirror over his bathroom sink.
Anderson gazed into the mirror. It being a mirror, he waited for his own reflected face to form from those electrified motes. Was his the face he had glimpsed peripherally on his computer monitor? Did the end entail looking into your own soul?
And a face did begin to materialize, vaguely, from the churning interference. It didn’t come into sharp focus, and it was not in the colors or textures of physical life, and yet he recognized its outline, the shape of its features.
He recognized it as Tammy’s face.
A tear coursed down his cheek again, but Anderson was smiling as he stretched out his arm.
Smiling as he reached through the glass.
Richard Gavin
* * *
A CAVERN OF REDBRICK
Richard Gavin writes numinous fiction in the tradition of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. To date he has published four short-story collections, including The Darkly Splendid Realm (Dark Regions Press, 2009) and At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012). He has also authored esoteric works and essays that explore the philosophical underpinnings of Horror. A resident of Ontario, Canada, Richard welcomes readers at richardgavin.net
See now as the boy sees. Bear witness to a summerworld, a place sparkling with clear light and redolent with the fragrance of new-mown grass and where the air itself hosts all the warmth and weightlessness of bathwater.
It is the first morning in this summerworld and, knowing that autumn is but a pinpoint in the future, Michael stands on the porch of his grandparents’ country home and allows the elation to erupt inside him. He then mounts his bicycle and rides headlong into the season.
The town whisks past him in a verdant smear. But Michael holds his destination firmly in his mind’s eye.
The gravel pit on the edge of town has long been his private sanctuary. He has escaped to that secret grey place more times than he can possibly remember. It is his own summer retreat, one of the many highlights of spending the summer with his grandparents in the little village of Cherring Point.
Visiting the pits is technically trespassing; his grandfather, who is charged by the government to occasionally man and maintain the place, has often told him to keep away from the place. Thus Michael keeps his mild transgressions to himself. Clearly he isn’t the only one to sneak into the secluded area. He isn’t the one who has cut the hole into the chain-link fence that distinguishes the property line, though he does always make sure to re-cover this portal with the brush that camouflages it.
Michael consoles himself with the logic that he really never disruptes anything in the pits. On his bike he would race over the mounds, which he likes to imagine as being the burial sites of behemoths. He loves watching his tires summon dirty fumes of gravel dust. Often that instant when his bike soars past the tipping point at the mounds’ summit, Michael feels as though he is flying.
It is his private ritual of summer elation; harmless and pure.
Except that today, on his inaugural visit of the season, Michael discovers that his ritual ground is no longer private . . .
His initial reaction to seeing the girl beyond the fence is shock, a feeling that gives way to an almost dizzying sense of disbelief.
At the far end of the lot is a large redbrick storage shed, its door of corrugated metal shut firm and secured with a shiny silver padlock. Michael has often fantasized about all manner of treasure being stored within those walls.
Standing on the shed’s roof is a girl whom Michael guesses to be no older than he is. She is dressed in a t-shirt only slightly whiter than her teeth. Her straw-coloured hair hangs to the middle of her back. Her bare feet are uncannily balanced at the very summit
of the shed’s pitched roof, yet she does not teeter or wave her arms to maintain this daring balance. She is as stationary as a totem.
Michael can feel her eyes upon him.
He veers his bike away and rides the paths above the gravel yard for a while, cutting sloppy figure-eights in the dirt while wrestling with whether or not he should retreat. What exactly is she trying to prove standing on the shed that way? What if she tries to speak to him, to suss out his reasons for coming here? What if this place is in fact her special place? Perhaps he has been the real outlander all this time.
Michael veers his bike cautiously back to the hidden gap in the fence, hoping, foolishly, that the girl will flee. He crouches low on his bike and glides to where the brush is thickest.
“What’s your name?”
The sound of her voice chills Michael. He wonders how she has spied him. Does her position on the roof make her all-seeing?
Like a surrendering soldier, Michael rides out from behind the greenery, clears the entrance to the pits and eases his bike toward the shed.
“How did you get up there?” he asks.
“Do you live near here?”
Michael frowns. “No. My grandparents do.”
“You’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”
“Neither are you!” Michael spits. He feels a strange and sudden rage overcoming him. Somehow his childish anxiety over seeing an interloper in his sanctuary pales beneath a fiery anger, something near to hatred. It erupts with such sharpness that Michael actually feels himself flinch, as though he’s been shocked by some hidden power line. Why should the girl anger him so? He wonders what it is about the nature of her innocuous questions that makes him despise her.
He pedals closer and is opening his mouth to say something, just what Michael isn’t sure, when a searing glint on the girl’s body forces him to screw up his face. Shielding his eyes with one hand, Michael gives the girl a long and scrutinizing glare.
And then he truly sees her . . .
Sees the flour-pale and bruise-blue pallor of her skin, sees the nuggets of crystallized water that form in her hair, in the folds of her oversized T-shirt, on her rigid ill-coloured limbs. Her eyes are almost solid white, but instinctively Michael knows that blindness is not the cause.
When she again asks Michael what his name is, her voice rises from somewhere in the gravel pits and not from her rigid face, for the girl’s jaw remains locked. For a beat Michael wonders if she is frozen solid.
To answer this thought, the girl suddenly raises her ice-scabbed arms as if to claim him.
Michael’s actions are so frantic they must appear as one vast and hectic gesture: the shriek, the rearing around of his bike, the aching, desperate scaling of the gravel mound, the piercing push through the tear in the fence, the breathless race across the fields.
Michael rides. And rides.
The distance Michael places between himself and the gravel yard brings little relief. Not even the sight of his grandparents’ home calms him. He rushes up their driveway, allows his bike to drop, then runs directly to the tiny guestroom that serves as his bedroom every summer vacation.
Burying his face in his pillow, Michael listens to the sound of approaching footsteps.
“Mikey, you all right?”
His grandmother’s musical voice is a balm to him. Michael lifts his head, but when he sees the reddish stains that mar his grandmother’s fingers and the apron she’s wearing he winces.
“What is it, son?”
He points a bent finger and his grandmother laughs.
“It’s strawberries, silly. I’m making jam. I saw you come tearing up the road like the devil himself was at your heels.”
Michael wipes his mouth. “Grandma, do you believe in ghosts?”
Her brow lifts behind her spectacles. “Ghosts? No, I can’t say that I do, Mikey. Why?”
His account of the experience reaches all the way to the tip of Michael’s tongue, but at the last instant he bites it back. He shakes his head, stays silent.
His grandmother frowns. “Too much time in the sun, dear. Why don’t you lie down for a while? I’ll wake you for lunch.”
Michael nods. His grandmother’s suggestion sounds very good indeed. He reclines his head back onto the pillows and shuts out the world.
He doesn’t realize he’s dozed off until he feels his grandmother nudging him. Perspiration has dried on his hair and skin, which makes him feel clammy. He shivers and then groggily makes his way to the kitchen to join his grandparents for sandwiches.
“What happened, sleepyhead?” his grandfather teases. “You didn’t tire yourself out on the first day, did you?”
His grandfather receives a sardonic swat from his grandmother, which makes Michael laugh.
“He probably just rode too long in the heat,” she says.
“Oh? Where’d you ride to?”
“Just . . . around.” Michael bites into his sandwich, hoping that this line of questioning will end.
“Mikey asked me a little earlier if I believed in ghosts.” His grandmother sets a tumbler of milk down in front of Michael as she settles into her chair.
“Ghosts? What brought that on?”
Michael shrugs. “Nothing. I was just wondering.”
He cannot be sure, but Michael feels that his grandfather’s glare on him has hardened.
Michael remains indoors, the only place he feels relatively secure, for the rest of the day. He helps his grandmother jar up the last of her jams and wash up afterwards. He watches cartoons while she prepares supper. His grandfather is outdoors, labouring on one of the seemingly endless projects which occupies so much of his time. He is a veritable stranger in the house. Last summer Michael had tried to assist him with the various chores, but he got the feeling that his grandfather found him more of a burden than an aid. So this year he takes his mother’s advice and just stays out of his grandfather’s way.
Though he’s never been mean, his grandfather does give off an air that Michael finds far less pleasant than that of his grandmother. She is always cheerful, brimming with old family stories or ideas of various things that he could help her with. Grandma’s chores never feel like work.
After supper Michael’s mother phones to see how his first day went. He is oddly grateful for the deep homesickness that hearing her voice summons; it means that he doesn’t have to think about what he’d seen that morning. His mother says she’ll be up to visit on the weekend.
The late morning nap and mounting anxieties make sleep almost impossible for Michael. He lies in his bed, which suddenly feels uncomfortably foreign, and wrestles with the implications of what he has seen, what he has experienced, for the encounter was far more than visual. Standing in the presence of that girl, whatever she had been, made the world feel different. Just recollecting the event made Michael feel dizzy.
Maybe his grandmother is right, maybe he has been riding too hard under the hot sun. After a time Michael understands that the only way he can put the incident behind him is to return to the pits, to test what he’d seen or thought he had seen. His teacher last year told him the first rule when learning about science and nature is that you must repeat the experiment. If you want to know the truth about something you have to do the same thing more than once. If the results are the same, then what you’ve found is something real.
Tomorrow he will go back. He will find the truth.
The girl is nowhere to be found. Michael rides out after breakfast, despite his grandmother advising him against it. He promises her he will ride slowly and in the shade, and that he’ll be home to help her with lunch.
Michael is so elated by the absence of the ugly vision that he plunges through the rip in the chain-link and begins to scale and shoot down the gravel mounds at a manic pace. Dust mushrooms up in his wake. Michael feels unfettered from everything.
The sound of an approaching vehicle st
artles him to such a degree that he almost loses his balance.
Glancing up to where the country lane meets the gate of the gravel pit, Michael spies his grandfather’s pickup truck. He performs a quick shoulder check, panicked by the distance that stretches between him and the hole in the fence.
His grandfather steps out of the cab. Realizing that he has no time to escape, Michael hunches low and pedals behind the farthest gravel mound. There he dismounts, crouches, and is punished by the thundering heartbeat in his ears.
The gate is unlocked, de-chained. The pickup truck comes crawling down along the narrow path, parking before the shed. Michael doesn’t hear the engine shut off and he wonders if his grandfather is just waiting for him to come out from behind the mound so he can run him down.
But then the engine is silent and is soon followed by the rumbling sound which signifies the corrugated metal door being opened. Has the ghost-girl flung the door open from the inside? Perhaps she has attacked his grandfather. Michael swallows. With utmost caution he creeps to the edge of the mound and peers.
It is dark inside the shed, so dark that it looks boundless; a deep cavern of redbrick. Michael can just discern the faintest suggestions of objects: power tools, equipment of various shapes, overfilled shelves of metal. The only item that stands out is the white box. It glows against the gloom and puts Michael in mind of Dracula’s coffin. But the sight of its orange power light glowing like a match flame confirms to Michael that it is nothing more than a freezer.
The shed’s corrugated door is drawn down. His grandfather must have chores to attend to in the shed. It likely won’t take him long to locate whatever tools he needs. Michael steals the opportunity to rush back to the tear and escape.
