She turned over, frowning as she felt for a cooler side of the pillow. That was it, maybe. She could relate to the feeling of being watched, of being scrutinized by people waiting for the pretty little prom princess to fail at something, anything to make them feel better. She’d never told anyone she felt like that—she worried it made her look conceited, another thing to criticize her for—but there had been dirty looks in high school hallways, and whispers trailing after her from bowed heads of gathered girls. More often than not there were the dull looks of girls dating her boyfriends’ friends, assumptions made about her motives and her sexual history, the slights and snubs of friendships already formed and unwilling to expand to accept “John’s new bimbo” or “Greg’s flavor of the month.”
A misdirected flare of anger made her cheeks hot. She felt a sudden hatred for those clueless, gossiping idiots outside, making narrow-minded judgments and pronouncements about Aggie based on their bored and limited world view. Fuck them. Who were they to label her senile? Who were they to say she couldn’t handle anything on her own that she set her mind to?
A throb of pain above the bridge of her nose made her grimace and then close her eyes. From what Aggie had been saying, Myrinda supposed the old woman had been having delusions. Wounds in the earth that opened up from another dimension, for God’s sake, with chaotic creatures crawling through it to spread their insanity sickness in this world. It sounded crazy.
But crazier than severed fingers crawling out of a heating vent into her living room? Crazier than hallucinating that Aggie Roesler’s body had split itself into bloodless chunks of flesh as she lay dying on the floor?
She heard the door open softly, just a little, and a wedge of light from the hall made the room a shade brighter.
“Babygirl?”
Myrinda didn’t answer him. There was still something nagging at her, something tangled beneath her conscious thoughts that she felt somehow needed processing, and she wanted her thoughts clear before she tried to voice anything to Derek.
She heard him enter the room, felt the movement of the bed as he sat on his side and leaned over to her.
“You awake, babygirl?”
She turned over to face him. In the semi-darkness, she could see a worried glint in his eyes. “Mm-hm,” she said.
“You okay?”
She offered him a sleepy smile. “I’m okay. Just...tired.”
“You hungry? Can I get you anything?”
“No, baby,” she said. She felt a surge of unexplainable annoyance, much like a monthly hormonal tide. Derek was only trying to take care of her, and yet his presence was starting to feel vaguely like an intrusion. “I just want to get some sleep.”
“Were you in the bathroom just now?”
“No,” she replied. “Why?”
He stroked her hair, looking into her eyes for some time before answering. “No reason. Get some sleep. I’ll be in later to check on you.” He kissed her forehead and got up, and she fought the annoyance at the thought of a future intrusion from washing over the warm, comforting feeling of his kiss.
“Okay,” she murmured. “I’ll probably be out before you come to bed.”
He nodded, paused in the doorway as if he had something else to ask her. He didn’t. “Good night, Myrinda.”
“Good night,” she replied, turning over.
He shut the door behind him, cutting off the light.
***
The upside-down commercial man appeared on the television again after Eda had gone to bed and Hal had settled in his chair to doze in front of a late-night western. The man’s voice, a presence in itself, cut through the first layer of sleep, and Hal’s eyes opened.
“Good evening, Hal.”
Hal blinked, the taste of sleep still in his mouth, and squinted at the television.
“Now that she’s gone to bed,” the man said, glancing at the bedroom door from the TV screen, “we can talk.”
“Talk?” Hal, still groggy, took in some of the background features on the screen—a stretch of green lawn like the apartment grounds behind the commercial man’s head, and a large, Victorian-style building with massive staggered wings seeming to envelope the man’s broad build. This time, instead of the polo shirt and slacks, the upside-down commercial man wore a sharp, expensive-looking business suit. “What do you want to talk about?”
The bright, buy-this-from-me smile shrank to a smirk. “I believe you already know. Wake up, Hal. You’ve been asleep for too long. I need you to focus.” Behind him, on the grounds, orderlies in scrubs with sets of metal jaws stretching their faces wide open were assisting slow-moving, dazed-looking people in pajamas. Many of the latter had blood streaking down from their hair or in long smears across their pajamas. One woman passed directly behind the upside-down commercial man; from the frame of the television, Hal could only see her from the hips up, but by the way she dragged herself, he could tell she was hurt badly. Her head was tilted forward and dark hair hung in her face, but as she shuffled by, Hal thought he caught a glimpse of her neck, the skin gray and dirty.
Hal leaned forward in his chair, glancing around the room. It was one thing to dream of the upside-down commercial man, but quite another thing entirely to be wide awake and watching him converse in real time from the TV screen. “What’s going on here? Are you some kind of hacker broadcast or something?”
“No, Hal, I’m not.”
“Well, look—I don’t know who you are, then, but if you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to call—”
“Mrs. Sunderman? I’m afraid she won’t be able to come to the phone. She’s occupied elsewhere. The police?” The man shook his head, his hair dangling. “I don’t advise putting yourself on the police’s radar. It will only make things messy later. I suppose you could call one of those...those places you have here in this world, the ones for containing those like us, but I suspect they greatly limit your personal freedoms.”
Hal considered just getting up and unplugging the television, or just walking right out of the room, but he found he couldn’t. He didn’t want to get close enough to the television that one of those solid arms could reach out and touch him, and he was afraid to turn his back, even for a second, on the commercial man. He couldn’t quite discount with reason the notion that if the upside-down commercial man wanted to pull himself bodily right out of the television screen, he could do just that. And then Hal would be without the gossamer safety of the screen glass between him and the whims of figure before him. “Are you...somewhere in this building? A tenant?” He fought to restore reason to his thoughts, to identify this man for what he was—a hacker, maybe, broadcasting from boosted Radio Shack equipment stashed in one of the first-floor apartments. A colleague messing with him. A nut-job stalker with a very real presence and a very real address.
He found it difficult to make any of those explanations work to his satisfaction.
“A tenant, no,” the man answered. “But in this building...yes. In a manner of speaking. We’re all in and out of this building, aren’t we?”
“Where are you broadcasting from?”
“I come from chaos. From chaos, erebus, and from erebus, the roads to death.”
“Death?” Hal wasn’t sure he understood any of what the man was getting at, but he did get the distinct feeling that the conversation was taking a bad turn. He surreptitiously felt along the seat cushion for the remote, and when he discovered the hard oblong of plastic, his fingers closed around it slowly.
The man’s smile disappeared. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The twinkle in the man’s eyes was swallowed by a blackness that made Hal think of sharks. Hal let go of the remote.
Just as quickly as it had darkened, the man’s expression lightened again. “Now then. Let’s get down to the business at hand.”
“I don’t—”
“Your killing of your wife, I mean.”
Hal glanced at the bedroom door, his hand flying to the remote again, to turn down the volume. A momen
t after, he drew his hand away, recognizing the move as both silly and useless. This man wasn’t really being broadcast on the television; on some level, Hal understood this without being able to explain what that really meant. Moreover, he understood that if this man wanted to talk to him, he would find a way, regardless of Hal’s powers with the remote. In fact, Hal got the distinct impression from those eyes and that terrible shark smile that the man had more ways than just the television to invade his life, and that he wasn’t going anywhere until Hal heard him out. He thought again of the man peeling himself off the television screen and dropping into his living room, and the thought made the dinner sitting in his stomach a heavy, gurgling thing.
“I can see from your expression,” the man said, his image dissolving for just a second into static pixels before reforming into perfect, slightly graying hair and rugged face, “that you need me to walk you through your reasoning. Maybe help you come up with a plan of execution. Which, of course, can be arranged. After all, that’s what I’m here for.”
“Why do you want me to kill my wife?”
The inverted brow crinkled innocently. “I don’t want anything for you, Hal, that you don’t want for yourself. I’m here to help you. I recognize in you what I know in me.”
“Who are you?”
The man smiled broadly. Upside-down, it looked like an obscene frown. “Why, I told you. I’m part of chaos. And you, my friend, are part of erebus. So you see, our roads lead inevitably to death. Eda’s death.”
Hal thought about this for a moment, unsure how to respond. He didn’t feel as frightened as he thought he should, or as horrified at the thought of killing Eda, either. He knew that was wrong, that it signified something wrong with him. The longer he talked to this man, the less he was really sure of, though. Again, he considered the possibility that maybe the upside-down commercial man wasn’t really coming through the television at all. Maybe he was being broadcast from inside Hal’s head, a visual hallucination. Maybe he was part of a tumor, or an early sign of the onset of dementia. Maybe...but he sounded pretty real to Hal. Hal pinched the bridge of his nose. It was harder, he noticed, to read body language and facial expressions of a man who was hanging upside-down.
“In other words, I’m what you need.”
“What I need,” Hal said, “is a head-shrinker. Or a better cable provider.”
“I think you need to understand something, Hal. I’m not asking you to commit murder. I’m asking you to act in your own self-defense.”
“What are you talking about?” Hal scoffed. “She’s not trying to kill me.”
The man looked knowingly at him, head slightly tilted. “Isn’t she, though?”
“No, of course not. She....”
“Loves you?” the man asked when Hal’s voice trailed off. “Is that what you were going to say?”
Hal wasn’t sure he was going to say it, wasn’t even sure if it was really true at this point in their marriage. He didn’t know what she felt, and it had sparked the faintest idea that maybe his fervent protests of her intentions (or lack thereof) were buoyed by...well, nothing substantial.
“We have history,” he said instead, sighing. He leaned back into his chair.
The man nodded—up-down-up-down. “And you don’t think history, by its very nature, is woven through with unbreakable habits, inescapable patterns? That it’s soaked, even saturated with years of disappointments and subsequent resentment? Of slights maybe forgiven but not forgotten? Or are you so confident your good times have outweighed the bad, at least so far as she’s concerned?”
“Okay, so what? She doesn’t love me anymore? She’s not happy in this marriage? We’re both too old to change. It’s not like either of us savors the idea of starting over alone at our age.”
“I think,” the man said, the words already chosen carefully from somewhere dark behind that perfect mask of salesmanship, “that you’d do well not to assume she thinks just like you do.”
“I’ve known her a long time,” Hal argued. “I know how she thinks.”
“Do you know she cheated on you?”
Hal was, for a minute, stunned to silence. Eda? Eda, for whom sex was handed out like a gold medal for the few and far-between things he did to appease her?
“You’re lying.” It was out of his mouth before he could stop it, and immediately after, he felt a cold unease.
The words hung ugly and heavy between him and the man on the screen for several seconds, before the man replied, unperturbed, “In fact, I’m not. She never made it a habit, but there was a man she met three times while you were on business trips. Three times she slept with this man. He’s dead now. He died in a fire. You didn’t know him. No one in her personal life did.”
“Wh—when?” Hal, still too stupefied to process this new piece of information, found that surprise took the lead ahead of hurt or anger. He hadn’t thought the old girl, even when she wasn’t old, had had it in her.
“Seven years ago. She meant to leave you for him. Not because she loved him, mind you, but because of his money. He had a lot of it at one time. He was a local politician, a man of small favors always owed to him. Some influence. But there was the fire. You may recall his death on the news. Gerald Wycoff.”
Neither the name nor the newsworthy item of his death in a fire rang any bells whatsoever. Hal had never cared much for politics, and even less for the men entrenched in them, but he did know it was always an interest of Eda’s. She was always trying to get him to watch the news, always snorting at his confusion over political issues on the voting ballot, his oblivious indifference to most current events. For years, it had been a chisel to the wall of their marriage, chipping off little pieces. She thought it made him dumb, or at the very least, uneducated and uncultured, that he couldn’t and didn’t care to follow politics. He thought her volunteering for local political campaigns and fundraisers was a vain and shallow attempt to ingratiate herself with better company. It was an interest of hers that had never cultivated more than resentment.
Well, he thought with a spike of bitterness, resentment and a damn dirty affair with a local political snake.
“It’s a matter of perspective,” the commercial man said placidly, making Hal jump. He’d almost forgotten the commercial man was there. “There are more ways to look at things than what resignation to your life has brought you to. And, of course, other solutions than simple resignation.”
Again, his hand closed around the remote, if only to try and regain some sense of control over this increasingly unpleasant conversation. A dull ache was beginning to form behind his right eye. “What do you want from me? God, what the hell are you?” He leaned forward, the remote in his hands. He wanted to hurl it at the television, to brain the man and make him fall from his inverted perch off-screen. Instead, the man pixelated again, static scrambling the rugged features, and for a few seconds, Hal thought he saw the thing beneath the salesman’s mask, a blurred kind of creature with a gaping mouth like an open zipper, except the teeth were sharp and the gullet beyond them an endless black abyss. The now-familiar form of the upside-down commercial man returned suddenly, like a figure emerging from the swirling depths of a snowstorm, but for another second or so, the afterimage of his true shape remained, a ghost imprint that gave an unpleasant cast to his features. Then it was gone, too.
“I told you, Hal,” the commercial man said, “I’m what you need. Think about the life you want and how to get it. I’ll be in touch.”
The television screen went dark.
***
In the night, the Old Ward stood silent. It had been silent for a long time. Faded memories of dusty voices and blurred faces echoed down the hall. Rust crusted the hinges on the heavy wooden front doors. Layers of gaudy spray paint marred the testaments to order that the administration building’s walls used to be. Cracks interwoven through the graffiti found water stains and those of something darker. Paint chipped and peeled like dry skin, flaking off from time to time to drift to the
gouged floor tiles. File folders, long emptied of classified contents, lay strewn and rotting on cracked and chipped desks, the muck of blown-in dirt and seeped-in rain beneath them making them pulpy, leaving them stuck in pools of their own kind of blood. Doors that had regularly stood locked now hung open, uneven, splintered by fingernails, chipped by rabid mouths of broken teeth. The Old Ward had indeed been silent, left untouched, for a long time. But it was not empty.
There were plans for restoration made by the Bridgehaven Historical Society, but they had yet to be started. The corporation who owned the surrounding land had insisted that the tenants of their new apartment building have time to settle in first, before that monument to depravity drew noisy work crews and dust and heavy equipment to trample the lawns. So The Old Ward stood as it had for nearly thirty years, with the Narrative in the tunnels beneath and the chaotic ones moving silently in their jerky, blurred way, around the debris. They went there when there was nowhere else to be; they found the idea of containment for creatures possessed of unbound insanity fascinating, and the ruins of such a place felt fitting to them.
What the chaotic ones had come to think of as the Narrative had opened the way. Through the Narrative, all questions were answered, all sights were seen, all words were given extra dimensions, and so, extra meanings and truths. The chaotic ones didn’t much care for these powers, had no interest in possessing the Narrative, but had always responded to the opening of the way. It called to them across the abyss and brought them into new worlds, and those new worlds gave them what they needed.
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