Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  It had been pretty easy, considering the overall attitude of Bridgehaven’s inhabitants, to get the old man to open up about the asylum’s sordid history. Wayne got the impression, as the mumbling wore on, that at least part of what the old man was saying had to do with doctors and nurses and wounds. Wayne’s engaging him in conversation about it caused that circumference of distance to widen, but no one stopped him from talking or even acknowledged that he was talking about it at all. It was as if the two of them had fallen into some side pocket of reality, able to see the bar around them but not really be a part of it, at least not so long they sat together. And so Wayne plied him with questions and wrote down notes as detail after gory detail poured out in a half-whisper, half moan, carried on puffs of alcohol-saturated breath. Wayne had to stop the old man when he got to the part about the paint jars, fearing that if the story continued, his three or four Sam Adamses might lurch up from their tentative place in his gut and onto his relatively expensive shoes.

  But now as he went through the story in his mind, recalling the pictures that the slurred cadence of violence had conjured, he felt an odd tingling beneath his skin, a kind of nervous anticipation.

  It hadn’t just been the night at the hospital. There had been the series of freak accidents during building, the high incidence of brawling among the workers. And the fire, of course. There had been the fire.

  The fire burned so hot and fast that it took down the newly-sheetrocked shell of the building in less than seven hours. Investigations into the cause of the fire proved inconclusive, although the general consensus was that it had been some faultily installed wiring. That was the general consensus, but it was the belief of the old man (and others, he’d been told) that the bad of the place had never left, and those crazy enough to build up and through that kind of bad had to expect it to cause problems.

  Warner, a sleek black and white cat who had been confidante and sidekick to him for about seven years, hopped up on his desk. Wayne stroked its back absently while it investigated Wayne’s work in progress. Behind the cat, he noticed a spider crawling across a yellow legal pad. He got up, carefully curling the pad to keep the spider contained, and walked it to the window. He didn’t like to kill bugs if he didn’t have to, or leave them to Warner’s predatory devices. He was just borrowing the planet, after all, like the rest of the creatures on it, and they had as much right to be there as he did. Balancing the legal pad on the window sill, he hefted the storm pane and screen up quickly, keeping an eye on the confused little spider skittering hesitantly in one direction, then skewing slightly off in another. He picked up the pad and brushed the spider out the window and out of sight.

  “Saved another one, Warner,” he told the cat, who responded with an indifferent stroll across his keyboard before jumping off the desk.

  Wayne turned to the window again to close the panes, and that was when he saw a girl standing out on the expansive lawn. She was shadowed, almost smoky, even though she stood in the bright gold of late morning sunshine.

  He frowned. She hadn’t been there a moment before. He rose to get a better view.

  She looked maybe fifteen or sixteen, tall and bony, her features all sharpness barely contained, hardly softened by the flesh stretched over them. She stared up at him, a smoldering hostility obvious, but for no consciously discernible aspect or expression. It was instinct, a gut reaction Wayne had to her—that she was toxic, and quite possibly dangerous. She wore a grayish hospital t-shirt and sweat pants with large, irregular dark stains. From that height, Wayne couldn’t see her face clearly enough to discern details, other than high, pale cheeks streaked with blood and dark hair that dangled in thick, wet strings. The part of him that remembered what his mother taught him considered calling out to her and asking if she was okay, but everything about her discouraged the thought. How was it the sun didn’t light any part of her? He felt the very wrongness of her in his chest and the first real weight of fear in his gut before the his brain registered that she had no shadow, that—

  —Oh God, she has no, she—oh God, she’s missing—

  Her hands. She was missing her hands. Her long, slender arms ended in heavily bruised wrists, and beyond those, nothing. Wayne felt his stomach tighten. That wasn’t all. She stood perfectly still—but only on the ankled stumps of her legs. Her feet were gone, too.

  “Warner,” he whispered to the cat. He needed the reality of his own voice, the sense of another familiar body in the room with him. He felt very shaky. “Warner, check this out.”

  Warner complied, hopping up on the window sill, and Wayne absently stroked its fur. He didn’t realize how tightly he had been gripping the cat’s back until it yowled, twisting away from him and jumping to his desk. Wayne barely registered it. His attention was fixed on the girl.

  Her face seemed to have come unhinged from her head. It slid to an odd angle, her crooked gaze watching him, then started to rock slowly back and forth, a layer somehow separate from her head. Suddenly it stopped, and the jaw stretched. The mouth gaped open, a dark chasm impossibly large, and black tendrils of smoke drifted upward out of it. The sound that swelled up from that narrow throat and out that gaping maw wasn’t human. In fact, it didn’t sound like any creature of this earth at all. Her skin, which had taken on a dirty grayish cast, suddenly spiderwebbed with skin-splits from which rivulets of red dribbled away.

  Wayne gripped the edge of the desk, unable to move, his breath a small, hard ball in his chest. His hand groped the desk for his cell. He wasn’t sure who he planned to call—Mrs. Sunderman, the police—but he had to call someone, had to get help before...before what?

  He imagined that thing down there, that horrible mockery of a person, jerking itself closer to the lobby door on its stumps, its face swinging, that air-raid howl shattering the glass of the doors. He could see in his head the stumps of her legs crunching over the broken glass, leaving untidy splatters of blood and clots on the tiled floor as it made its way closer....

  He thought he might throw up. With the one hand not blindly groping for the cell, Wayne gripped the window sill, waiting for the feeling to pass. Where was the damn phone? He glanced down and saw it knocked askew by the cat. He grabbed it and tapped the phone to bring up the keypad. He looked up, his finger hovering over the “9.”

  The girl was gone.

  THREE

  Detective Jack Larson of 2J had spent the better part of his leave of absence watching his new neighbors move in. There had been the old lady first, who had moved her two suitcases, some folding chairs and end tables, a couch, and a few old boxes into 2H with help from a tall thinking reed of a young man who came and went like the wind. There was the terse woman and her tired-looking husband from 2A who followed next, the hum of tension between them nearly palpable, followed by the recluse writer in 2B (“I think he was one of those club kids in the 80s NYC scene,” Mrs. Sunderman had informed him one day in a conspiratorial hush, followed by a meaningful look and a gesture like she was sniffing something off the cupped underside of her long ruby-painted pinkie fingernail). There were also the newest editions, the couple in 2E. They were beautiful people, both of them, and seemed, from the subtle and intimate gestures between them, to be very much in love.

  He was most fascinated, however, with the new woman in 2C. In Larson’s experience, there were two equal but very different kinds of beautiful women. There were some whose beauty warmed you, invited and comforted you, women you fell in love with for their smile, the flow of their hair, the gentle slopes of their curves. And there were women whose beauty chilled and intimidated others—a rarer kind of beauty, the kind that almost made you look away for fear of somehow being mocked by a thing you knew could never belong to you. Those were not women who were truly and healthily loved, but obsessed over. Fretted over. Women whose intimacy and most secret lives were forever out of reach.

  One could know the destructive force these kinds of women could be, Larson discovered, and still find oneself succumbing to the inexor
able pull of them.

  He’d known a woman like that once and lost her. Julia had been that rare latter kind of beauty—just like the woman from 2C. The striking resemblance between them hurt his heart. It made his hands ache, his head ache. The little details were different—this woman’s hair was blond and short and her style of dress less aggressively sexy, for example—but it was her, down to the subtle self-aware way in which she moved and stood.

  It had been that first woman, Julia, who had sent him from Boston to Bridgehaven in whiskey-laced grief and abandon, lacking sleep and food, indifferent to names and dates. He’d used up his vacation at the behest of his chief, a C.O. in every sense, and then dipped into his short-term disability. There had been psych evaluations and a half-hearted attempt at AA, but no more than three weeks had passed before he was blowing both off and dodging the increasingly impatient follow-up calls. He needed time, dammit, time to himself, to grieve and to think. When he looked in the mirror, he saw dark whiskers just going gray, the strength gone out of his football-player bulk, the fight gone out of his blue eyes. The former two things he didn’t care much to do anything about, but the latter—the latter had to be rectified for his own sake. His own sanity.

  Larson thought the fix lay with the woman from 2C. He wanted to (possess her) meet her, get to know her. It was something he’d realized one morning in the kitchen of the new place. She had been put there for him, a second chance. The idea made every cell in his body sing with emotions—elation, relief, excitement, love. He could win her over—he thought could make it happen in a way he never could with...the other woman.

  The evening that Larson stood out on the front lawn looking up at the window to the apartment of 2C, the curtains confirmed he was right. A series of small but obviously connected events, a breadcrumb trail of clues, had led him to the curtains. The need for complexity was obvious; this woman, like the last one, surely had a man. Women like that always did. Larson wasn’t jealous; women like her deserved someone to protect them, to take care of their needs. Those men served a purpose. And once Larson could be with her, he would serve that purpose and she wouldn’t need other men anymore. He would do it all for her, give her everything she could ever need or want.

  In the meantime, the breadcrumb trail served the purpose of discretion, and also gave him an opportunity to prove his devotion, his patience, and his intellect. He’d follow her little subtle clues and in the end, he’d go to her with open arms.

  First, there were the sticky notes. He’d shuffled into the kitchen one morning to get coffee and milk—a mugful of each usually settled the rot in his gut and the dry pounding in his head. The first of the sticky notes was on the fridge; he saw it when he went to get the milk. He frowned, squinting through the pain in his head to read it.

  Today’s the day, the note told him. Just three words, unprecedented and unsigned.

  He had no recollection of writing himself a note about anything, nor of there even being such sticky notes in the apartment. And he didn’t think that day was momentous or anniversarial in any way. It was Tuesday, the 11th. What had he wanted to single out today for? The day for what? He couldn’t remember. His head throbbed as he leaned in, peering closer at the tight-looped, heavy-stroked handwriting, slanted slightly to the left.

  Handwriting, it dawned on him, that most definitely wasn’t his.

  Today’s the day.

  For a moment, a flare of alertness set his head turning sharply, scanning the kitchen for signs of intrusion. He made a swift check of the door (locked and bolted, as it should be) and of the windows (unopened, second floor) and found no evidence of attempted entry, or of any other presence than his in the apartment. He went back to the kitchen. The sticky note still hung there with its simple proclamation. He grabbed it, crumpled it, and threw it away, wiping his hand on his robe, knowing it was silly but still feeling like his hand had touched something unnatural, something poisonous. It was just a stupid sticky note, he told himself, and probably one he’d written himself in a drunken stupor, the booze rendering his handwriting strange and unrecognizable.

  Seventeen years of police work, much of which had been in district A-1 and the last seven of which had been as Sergeant Detective with the BIS, had taught him to hone the natural instinct he had to understand possible subtext beneath the elements, sometimes unusually disparate, of a case. Usually, the train of logic made neat little mental stepping stones in his mind. Once in a while, though, some of those stepping stones would lie submerged beneath the surface of missing facts, or more lately, beneath swamps of alcohol. He’d learned to bridge those gaps pretty well, gathering seemingly unrelated snippets of conversation, paper trails, crime scene photos, and the like. His mind tried connecting the pieces together quietly in the background, keeping what fit and reworking what didn’t, while the forefront of his thoughts worked on other things. It had been that process which led him, hours later as he napped on the couch, to realize what the note meant. He sat upright suddenly.

  Today’s the day. It sure was, goddamn it, and he’d almost slept it away!

  He hopped up and made his way into the kitchen, crossing to the counter by the cordless phone. A stack of papers—folded take-out menus, mostly, along with unopened bills, bank statements and credit card offers—lay in a messy heap next to the phone. He rifled through it until he found what he was looking for: a small daily calendar. Each day presented an uplifting saying and above that, a colorful image—spirals, mostly. He’d had it on his desk at work—some generic stocking stuffer he’d gotten at the precinct Christmas party the December before. One afternoon, Feehan had walked by carrying coffee in a foam cup and a Twinkie (Larson didn’t even know they made Twinkies anymore; he suspected, in fact, that the remaining Twinkies of the world, the “fruitcakes” of the snack set, were simply regifted until someone like Feehan came along and ate them) and Feehan had stopped.

  “Julia sets,” he’d said through a mouthful of spongy cake.

  “Huh?”

  He’d nodded down at the calendar. “Julia set fractals.”

  Larson had stared at him, unsure if Feehan was pulling his leg. Julia (that other woman) was a name he’d repeated so many times in his mind that he’d felt, explored, understood every aspect of it, could taste it. A flood of thoughts made it difficult to respond. He wondered if the other guys in the precinct could sense those thoughts, and the emotions behind them. It was crucial to staying on the case that they did not.

  He was about to ask, “What the fuck you talking about?” when Feehan waved his Twinkie dismissively and walked away.

  As it turned out, Julia sets, named for French mathematician Gaston Julia and not for his own Julia, were functions used in the making of fractal art. Julia sets were such that slight permutations caused drastic changes in the pattern, he’d discovered. He didn’t know much about math—cared even less—but the art had kind of a soothing effect, a pattern repeating to infinity, God in mathematical art form. That they were created from something bearing the name of the most important woman he’d ever encountered seemed pleasantly fortuitous.

  Gazing at the calendar, he saw the transport from office desk to box to car trunk to new apartment to counter had weakened the binding, and many pages had fallen out or were hanging like loose teeth by thin strands of glue. He gave the calendar a little shake and the loose pages, too, fell away, fluttering to the floor. The new top page revealed today’s date.

  The message of encouragement: Go after something you’ve always wanted. Today’s the day!

  The image above it: a Julia set fractal. Blue, like her eyes had been. Blue had been her favorite color. Fractals. Glorious patterns from the slightest of evolutions. Vivid and emotional and breathtaking art made from the colorless fact of repetition. There was something here, some step to be taken, some message to be read and understood.

  Messages. Sticky notes. But who...how...? He looked up from the calendar and turned to the fridge, his breath a tight fist in his chest.


  The slightest of evolutions. Lighter hair, darker eyes.

  He thought he knew what to do next.

  ***

  Mrs. Aggie Roesler knew they were from the other dimension, the word for them something she suspected her vocal chords couldn’t quite pronounce, though she dared not try out loud. In her head, it was a hissing word for them: hinshing. She knew what they were the same way one knew things in dreams, a certainty no less trustworthy for its sourcelessness. Since she’d moved into 2H, she’d seen them often. During the day, they were a mottled sickness-yellow, but as night came on, they darkened to a tumor-black. They were humanoid, but completely hairless and sexless. They were essentially faceless, too, except for an angry red schism of a mouth running the vertical length of the facial plane. Lipless, the mouth opened to several rows of small, sharp teeth that made Aggie think of serrated bear traps stood on end. The backs of the creatures, as well as the backs of their trailing, pointed heads, smeared outward, producing a strange optical effect that suggested motion caught on film. Their movements were jagged and to Aggie, jarring. It was as if they skipped frames of reality, slipping along from one conscious moment to the next. Their long fingers had no nails or claws, but rather, ended in sharp little points. Their knees bent backward, their wiry legs able to pivot in multiple directions from high-set hips.

  What bothered her more than their unfathomable alienness was that they could, at times, look quite familiar. Sometimes, they looked like memories, and that was worse than any foreign aspect of their true forms. When it suited them, they could look very much like everyone else. But she could see. Oh yes. She could see.