Cauchemar

by Alexandra Grigorescu

  A briny odor filled the house, so thick it almost colored the air. “Are any of them poisonous?”

  “No, they’re Brahminys.” James carefully pinched at a streak of blood on his pant leg. “You could eat their heart.” To Hannah’s shocked face, he explained, “Another story from my childhood. Eat the heart of a black snake for courage, or wear its skeleton to cure an ache.” Something slid against the bathroom tiles and James reached over her to slam the door shut. “Am I still dreaming?”

  “Maybe we both are.” Hannah suddenly looked upstairs, toward the silence. She leaned forward and plucked a candle from a shelf on the bookcase. The white wax was already beginning to drip, and she relished each small instant of pain as it dried on the back of her hand. “Callum couldn’t have slept through that.”

  “We were screaming bloody murder down here, and I haven’t heard a peep from him. When did he get to have such a low tolerance?”

  “His appetite’s been bad.” Hannah went to stand at the bottom of the stairs. Shadows wound ahead of her extended candle. “Callum,” she called up softly, then climbed the stairs when there was no answer. Wax dripped onto her toes.

  She paused in front of their bedroom and waited for James to catch up. The hammer swung weakly from his hands. He looked spent.

  Callum lay on his back in bed. Hannah could make out a large crack that had appeared just under the windowsill, snaking toward the floor and disappearing below the rug. She gripped the gold candleholder with both hands to stop their shaking as she walked into the room.

  Graydon stood on the dresser, tremors passing up and down his back. He stared unblinking at Callum’s body and let loose low growls.

  “Baby,” Hannah whispered, as she rounded his side of the bed. When she saw him, the candle dropped from her hands as if it’d been slapped, and she scurried to catch it.

  Callum’s eyes were wide open, the whites of his eyes immense and reflecting the light of the moon. His hands were curled against his chest, fetal, and his legs paddled weakly beneath the covers. Hannah sat carefully on the edge of the bed and tried to hold down his feet. His mouth was curved into a manic smile, open and obscene, completely at odds with the terror she saw on his face. She had seen such an expression somewhere before. Jacob, she suddenly thought.

  “Callum, snap out of it.” Hannah shook him roughly.

  A strangled sound came from his throat.

  “What’s happening?” James said from behind her.

  “Something’s wrong! He’s not waking up.”

  James leaned over Callum and expertly found his pulse. “Come on, buddy. What did you take?” He mouthed out a count to thirty. “It’s shallow,” he said to Hannah, and took the candle from her hands. James waved the flame in front of his eyes, pushing back the eyelids with his fingers. “His eyes aren’t following the light. Is he on anything? Has he been using again?”

  Hannah shook her head. James rifled through the dresser drawers, tossing up Hannah’s underwear. “What are you doing?”

  “You can’t always be sure.” He knocked aside her hairbrush and a bottle of lavender oil as he searched.

  “I told you, he’s not on anything. Do something—”

  Callum gargled from the bed again and his hand shot out, closing around Hannah’s right wrist tight enough to close off her circulation.

  “Okay, that’s enough.” James set down the candle and dove onto the bed. He tried to pull Callum’s arm away, but his grip didn’t loosen. James punched Callum’s shoulder.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Hannah yelped, even as Callum’s nails dug so deep that they drew blood.

  “Callum, stop!” James slapped his face, but the blanched, smiling mask didn’t slip. Callum’s other hand shot out blindly and struck James with incredible strength. The man crumpled, and fell off the bed.

  “Jacob?” Hannah breathed, and in response, a burst of spittle left Callum’s mouth, and a single fly, black and benign, fell from his lips.

  “You are not yours,” he howled. The veins of his face seemed to swell.

  Then it was over. His grip loosened, but Hannah didn’t move her hand despite the pain. His feet stilled and his mouth became slack. His eyes closed, and a few moments later, his breath evened.

  Graydon hissed frantically from a corner of the room, but Hannah gave only a passing glance to her wrist. The duvet was dotted with blood. She didn’t know how long she stayed like that, unwilling or unable to move. She turned his words over in her mind, trying to find meaning.

  “What the hell just happened?” James asked as he struggled to sit up.

  Hannah took a breath. “You had a bit too much to drink, James. You fell down. Do you feel concussed?” Her lie slipped out without effort.

  James sat on the bed beside her, shaking his head. “Something was wrong with him. I think—he hit me.” The words curled into a question. She saw recrimination in his eyes when they turned to her.

  “No. Can you believe it?” she said, feeling herself smile. “He slept through the whole thing.” She stood, sure-footed, and grabbed a sweater from the dresser. The sleeves came down to her knuckles. “Are you feeling nauseous at all? Dizzy?”

  James felt the caked blood under his nose. “Did I fall on my face?”

  Hannah nodded and pulled a clean towel from the top shelf of the closet. “Let’s get you cleaned up, and then you should rest,” she said, tossing him the towel. “It’ll be light soon.”

  She hurried down the stairs, briefly distracted by the constellation of candlelight, and clicked the bathroom door behind her. The live snakes had retreated from where they’d come, but five dead bodies lay flattened. They seemed smaller now. Five snakes in a house could be explained, she hoped, but an army seemed the stuff of nightmares.

  She lowered the toilet lid, pulled a towel from its rack, and sat down. Not realizing at first what she intended to do, she selected the largest of the crushed snakes and dropped it into the towel. She clutched a pair of cuticle scissors and carefully made an incision down its length. She felt far removed from herself, almost as if someone else was guiding her hands. No tremor disturbed her movements as she parted the flesh below its head, followed the skeleton to find its lungs, and touched the tip of the scissors to the sac that she intuited housed its heart.

  She snipped the small shreds of tissue on either side and lifted it out whole. As she cradled it, her resolve wavered, replaced by revulsion. She stared with numb horror at the snake’s body and, without thinking, slammed her foot down until the evidence of her cuts was lost. The cuticle scissors landed in the garbage can.

  On her way out, she prodded another of the dead snakes with her foot and nodded to herself when it didn’t budge. The heart she carried with her into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Callum chewed half a piece of toast into mush, bleary eyed, while James ate a banana, massaging his nose. Neither of them noticed that Hannah sat straight-backed, only sipping a tea from Mae’s collection. Dried lemon balm, to ease her nervousness.

  The memory of what she’d eaten the night before, greasy under a crust of black pepper and chili peppers, would suffice for days. She’d cooked it quickly, reaching blindly for spices, and continuing to flavor the snake heart even after it was coated. She hadn’t been able to finish it, but her body kept down what she consumed.

  Then, she’d sunk to the floor and followed its passage through her body with a fingertip, the junctures at which her stomach resisted, the way it broke through. When it reached her belly, she patted it with warm hands, imagining that it would strengthen her baby. She had looked down and saw her wrist, raw as if with stigmata.

  After their meager lunch, James left quickly, not giving Callum enough time to consider the delicate bruises under James’s eyes, the elephantine swelling of his nose. “Something happened last night,” James said on his way out.
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br />   “Snakes,” she said wearily. “They came in through the drains. It seems like all the earth’s plagues are coming down on us.”

  James patted the swollen tissue around his nose. “After that, I mean.”

  Hannah shrugged.

  “You’re not alone, Hannah, and it’s not weakness to ask for help when you need it. There are things in this world that are out of our control.”

  Hannah could almost taste the relief of sharing her burden with someone, of accepting help, but she knew it would be short-lived. “I remember a boy who felt very differently. All those things you said last night? When did you get to be so knowledgeable about the other side?”

  James’s bloodshot eyes hardened. “To fight a thing, you have to understand it.”

  They stared at each other, locked in a contest to see who would yield first.

  “You call me if you need anything at all,” James said finally.

  Hannah closed the door behind him, then walked slowly into the living room and let herself sag onto the couch. The baby was unusually slow but she could sense an undercurrent of strength since the previous night, some new measure of endurance. She felt it in herself as well.

  The corner of the wedding magazine winked white from beneath the coffee table. She flipped the pages slowly. A pale redhead smiled shyly under her feathered headpiece, her shoulders covered with fine lace. She plucked a bouquet of dried lavender from a vase on the table and tapped Graydon on the head with it. “Couldn’t I just walk this down my own backyard?” she asked. The cat snorted lightly, his tail swinging like a pendulum.

  “I don’t see why not,” Callum said from the doorway. Hannah felt herself flush, and she quickly pushed the magazine behind her back.

  “I was just bored.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t make excuses. This makes me happy.” He cleared a space on the coffee table and sat down in front of her. He reached behind her and pulled the magazine onto his knees. Upside down, the woman’s face looked as if it were being swallowed whole by the frothy white. “Is this something you might want to talk about now?”

  Nerves rose like a geyser into her throat. “Later,” she managed to choke out.

  “Later is fine, Hannah. Later is not never.”

  Hannah could only nod, as she touched a sprig of white hair at his temple.

  “Well, I’ve cleaned out the snakes. Safe to say, we’ll need a new mop. James really went to town on them.”

  “It was a shocking sight.” When she thought of Callum finding out what she’d done, the barbaric violence of it, she felt ashamed. And yet, some small part of her felt brash, almost pleased by her action. It felt like resistance.

  “Remind me of this next time I reach for the bottle, but I’m never drinking that much again. I had this terrible feeling,” he smiled to dismiss his words, “that I couldn’t move, like there was something holding me down. It looked like my father, and he was grinning.”

  Hannah ran her fingers over the nicked wood of the coffee table. She felt that she was standing at a precipice, and if she were to speak, she might topple. Instead, she thought the word: cauchemar. The spirits that were said to ride the living in their sleep, seated on their sternum. The pillow lines in the morning would be the indents of their lassos, tight and commanding.

  Old Doug had once claimed that his daughter, Abigail, had visited him after her death. Her slender thighs had been like a vice around his body. When he’d tried to push her off, she’d lashed him with serrated nails and continued her slow rock atop his body, the creaking interminable. He’d told Mae this, his shirt unbuttoned around the gash in his chest. Hannah remembered his face, downturned and shamed.

  “We all have nightmares,” Hannah said. “Maybe, they’re the mind’s way of working through things.”

  Callum studied her for a long moment. “I have a show in town tonight. It was a last-minute cancellation, and frankly it’s flattering that they even thought to ask, considering that every booker in town seems to have forgotten about me. Do you want to come?”

  Hannah looked warily at the growing pile of dirty laundry in the hamper. It was close to toppling. She thought of the pressing bodies, the heavy smoke. The noise. “It’s supposed to rain. Maybe I’ll just sit this one out.”

  “You sure? Can it be that you finally trust me?” he asked.

  “The jury’s still out on that one,” she replied evenly. “But go anyways.”

  Callum smiled sheepishly. “Can I get you anything before I go? Do you want me to whip up something for an early dinner?”

  Hannah ran her thumb over the crease in his forehead. “Be good, that’s all.”

  He shut his eyes for a moment. “Always.”

  “Out with you then.”

  “What are you going to do while I’m gone?” He was already up and animated, distracted by the set list Hannah knew he was shaping in his head, but every few steps, he’d stop his pacing and sway, as though stricken by vertigo.

  “I have a busy night of domesticity planned,” she said and scooped up Graydon. He nuzzled his wet snout against her neck and purred. He’d been neglected in recent months.

  Callum zipped his guitar case and unplugged his amp. As he walked, he tugged off his shirt and Hannah felt a pang. His ribs were like frets. She could’ve fit her nails between them and plucked a melody from his groans. He pulled a black T-shirt from the hamper, sniffed it, then put it on.

  “I’m going to pretend you said you have a busy night of lying on the couch and relaxing ahead of you,” he admonished her.

  “And you be careful on the water. I don’t like you driving that boat in the rain.”

  He put down his gear and turned around, shaking his head. “What am I doing,” he muttered to himself, then, louder, “I’m not going anywhere. I shouldn’t leave you alone.”

  Hannah released the cat and held up her hands in a pantomime. “Four walls, see?”

  “There were four walls before, too.”

  Hannah hesitated. She knew he was right, and it was tempting to claim him for herself, not to share him with the crowd’s faceless fawning. But the temptation was tempered by the memory of his hand squeezing the muscles of her wrist to pulp. When he’d asked, she’d blamed the gashes on Graydon, and when he’d tried to bandage the wounds, she’d pulled away, searching his eyes for some covert presence.

  “Stop it, I’m a grown woman. Go enjoy yourself.”

  After he left, scrawling the number of the club where he’d be playing on a notepad, Hannah turned on the radio and wrapped her sweater tightly around herself. She walked from room to room, turning on all the lights and wondering if the power would go out again. The music was old, before her time, and even though she didn’t recognize it, she found she could hum along.

  The thunder began outside and she turned the music up, beginning to sway lightly. “This is how you dance,” she whispered to her stomach, her hips forming figure eights. “If you lead, it’s important to consider your partner. And if you follow, and you’re anything like your mom, it’s important to actually let your partner lead. Even if your partner is your daddy, who’s slow as molasses.”

  She thought of a toddler’s small, swaddled feet padding along with hers, and realized she didn’t know at what age her child would begin to walk. Callum had bought pregnancy and baby books for her in the early months, but she hadn’t scanned their pages in a long time, preferring Mae’s lined notebooks of recipes for teas, stews for pregnant mothers, and homemade baby food made from pureed prunes and honey. She’d thought she could manage on those alone.

  Hannah tossed the clothes into the washer and the back of the house filled with the smell of detergent and the unsteady clanking of the ancient machine.

  In the living room, the radio began to crackle. The music was interrupted by loud volleys of static. She fiddled with the dust-covered knobs, but everythi
ng was dissipating into static. A bright crack of lightning illuminated the trees outside and she clicked the radio off.

  She poured herself a glass of orange juice and fell into Mae’s old chair, covering herself with the afghan that had lain over it for years. The clock on the wall read nine, and she threaded her fingers together around the glass. Graydon was curled like a croissant on the couch, his tail flicking back and forth as lightning flashed outside.

  The radio clicked back on by itself, flooding the room with a low crackle, and she only distantly understood that this was strange. She closed her eyes and tried to find a lulling rhythm in the sound. Her body felt heavy.

  The static swelled like a deeply drawn breath. There were tones in the hissing, gathering and coalescing. Slowly, she stood and walked toward the radio. A loud boom sounded in the front of the house. She pressed herself against the living room wall. The sound shifted and Hannah flinched. The radio had spoken her name.

  “Who are you?” she asked the empty room.

  The radio repeated her name.

  “I’ve done nothing wrong!” The absurdity of her voice echoing through the empty room made her fall silent, even as she heard thuds against the windows.

  All she could see was a flurry of feathers, materializing out of the darkness, then briefly lit by the lamps inside. Dozens of birds breaking their skulls against her windows, leaving a smear of red in their wake.

  “Stop,” she whispered, and the lights began to flicker. Hannah could hear something rustling through the walls, worming through deep channels. “This is my house!”

  A howl came from the radio. Not yours, the static gathered into words. The ceiling light above her began to shake. The bulb broke and rained down fine glass. As she watched, a large black fly stepped over the filament and settled on the edge of the lamp.

  “What do you want?” She addressed the fly.

  A black cord slipped out of the lamp’s bottom. Then it separated and burst apart into a swarm of flies. Hannah gasped and dropped to the floor, covering her face with her hands. “No!” she cried, but they buzzed against her belly, tunneling into her ears. A fly flew into her mouth and she clamped her teeth shut on a wing. She felt its feet scuttling down her tongue.