Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Yes, he thought. Yes. I’m trying to take it all back—my life, my confidence, my peace and quiet. I’m taking it all back.

  With a ding, the doors opened and Hal stepped out onto the second floor. The hallway at that hour fell mostly in shadow, except for the soft lights at either end where the exits stood. The door to 2A was closed, the thin band of space beneath it dark, just as he’d left it. Eda was likely still in bed, asleep. He crossed the hall and let himself in.

  The furniture of the apartment swam up from the darkness, taking shape. It was so quiet. So peaceful. His heart was at ease. After tonight, he’d have all the peace and quiet he’d ever want, inside and out.

  The television came on, and although the volume was turned down low, the sudden bright box of static made him jump. Hal frowned. He knelt in front of it and leaned his head in until his ear was nearly touching the screen. There! There it was, just beneath the low buzz of static—voices talking. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but at times they sounded desperate or feverishly gleeful. Once he thought he heard his name, but he couldn’t be sure. Then the television went dark and silent. A note of subtle encouragement, maybe, from the upside-down commercial man.

  His attention returned to the bedroom. Its door was ajar. From the darkness within, he heard the bed creak lightly as she turned over. Hal rose slowly, clutching the axe handle in both hands, and moved toward the dark enshrouding his sleeping wife.

  He hovered in the doorway for several minutes. It wasn’t hesitation on his part; even in the deep folds and tucked-away places of his mind, there was nothing of the old Hal’s thoughts or feelings toward Eda left. It wasn’t quite that he was savoring the moment, though, either. Rather, it was as if his life had been a long highway with a series of exits. For so long, he had reluctantly passed those exits, hoping to get somewhere, anywhere, faster without running the risk of a detour’s delay or derailment. Tonight, he was taking an important exit that would change the course of his journey forever. It would reroute him to a new destination. And as he stood in the doorway, his breathing soft and even like hers, he reflected that in making that turnoff, he was admitting to himself that there had, at least for the last few decades, been no end destination to reach—at least, not one he could clearly qualify to himself or justify anymore in whole or in part. That realization, that all of it was Eda’s fault, spurred him forward into the room.

  Eda snored softly into the pillow. She had managed to tangle part of the sheet around her waist and legs; it was a small thing, really, but caught Hal off guard, given the unnaturally stiff and unshifting way in which she slept.

  Like a vampire in a coffin, he thought, and a grim smile spread across his face.

  Eda turned over, her eyelids fluttering a moment before closing again. “Butter,” she mumbled. Another thing that threw him; she never talked in her sleep.

  “What?” he whispered.

  “You got the wrong butter,” she mumbled. He supposed she was dreaming, but it irked him. Even in her dreams, he was doing something wrong.

  “You need to take it back. I can’t do anything with it,” she mumbled, snorted loudly, then resumed her light snore.

  Take it back.

  He looked down at her, at the sharp cheeks and chin on the pillow, the brow creased in disappointment and disapproval even in sleep. The lips were pursed in a smug sort of smile, as if his dreamed-of mistake reaffirmed her opinion of him in the waking world. That was not the face of the woman who had smiled to see him come home from work in their early years. The gray hair fanned soft and thin on the pillow behind her was not what he had stroked and smelled as he held her close. He studied the pointed fingertips that had poked his arm so many times at social affairs in her “subtle” attempts at correcting his boorish behavior. Those fingertips curled inward toward her palms now like shriveled flowers, little angry, razorboned fists on the pillow beside her face. Those were not the hands he’d held during courtship. Her bony shoulders, the one exposed bony knee—the body laying beneath the sheet was not the one he’d touched, caressed, made love to when sex was still more important than Wheel of Fortune. And none of that, he realized, was the problem. That her body had changed—that had never phased him. That her mind and heart had changed...that had made all the difference in the world.

  Take it back.

  She couldn’t—she wouldn’t—do anything with what they had become. But he could.

  Damn right. I’m taking it all back.

  He raised the axe. He could destroy the part of her that had changed.

  As she moved to turn over again, her eyes opened. It was as if she sensed him, smelled the metallic tang of the axe blade, felt his anxious heat, heard his breathing. She just had time to open her mouth and say “Ha—” before he caught her above the right eye. He was surprised by how little force it took to bury the axe so deep into her head. The momentum carried his motion through for him. Her skull made a sound like an egg cracking and her hair caved in a little along the fault line where the blade had hit it. She made a strange little sighing sound and dropped onto the pillow. There was a lot of blood, but not nearly as much as on television. It seeped into the crisp white of her pillowcase, staining a halo around her disarranged hair. Her legs, hooked around the edge of the bed sheet, twitched feebly and the unpainted, neatly pedicured toes spasmed toward his thigh. Her shriveled flower-fists trembled. Although Eda had always been fastidious about using the bathroom first and last thing of the day to, as she put it, “remove as many toxins and impurities as possible,” the smell of urine emanated from a different dark stain which spread across the tangle of sheet around her waist.

  Then she stopped moving, ceased to be a person at all, and an empty thing blue-gray in the moonlight, a mere bundle of sticks over which a thin canvas had been stretched, lay in lieu.

  Hal was alone. Even the commercial man was silent, gone off to wherever commercial men go when they’ve gotten old husbands to finally get rid of old wives.

  He wondered if he should close her eyes—the blood from her head wound was collecting and dripping off the lashes of the right eyelid—and decided against it. He liked the wide white orbs caught like that in a perpetual state of surprise. He grinned as he studied the slack bottom jaw, where indignation had been overcome by fear. God, how he’d loved knocking loose that tightly smug smile, that expression of grim self-satisfaction, as if always having to nag him was a burden, but one that would nevertheless be sure to propel her straight to the top of the list for sainthood.

  Hal dropped the bloody axe by the side of the bed, then made his way to the kitchen. He got two beers, one for now and one to save him the trip later, and then settled himself in his chair in front of the TV. With confidence, he picked up the remote and clicked on the television, half-expecting the upside-down commercial man to be there waiting to congratulate him. An infomercial man with a beard yelled about his excitement over a cleaning sponge. He changed the channel. An old black and white Western. He waited. Closed his eyes and opened them. No sign of the upside-down commercial man. He clicked to a static channel, feeling vaguely perturbed. Still no sign of his mentor in murder.

  Hal felt slighted and a little scared. Had the commercial man abandoned him, after all that? Or had he been dismissed now that he’d killed his wife?

  He gulped his beer, and with each listless click to a new channel, his eyelids grew heavier. Halfway through his second beer, he fell asleep with the bottle in his hand. About four in the morning, the glow of the TV and voices breaking through the edge of his sleep woke him, but there was only static on the screen. He reached over to the remote, which had fallen from his grasp, and clicked off the television.

  Leaving the half-drunk beer on the end table, he trudged to the bedroom. Eda lay stiff as always, cooling and congealing on her side of the bed. He climbed in next to her and within minutes, he had fallen into a deep sleep.

  FIFTEEN

  When Wayne awoke, he felt disoriented and groggy. Remembering
the tunnel, he jumped and promptly fell off the bed in a tangle of sheets. It didn’t stop him from scrabbling across the floor, away from the bed. Part of his mind was still in under the Old Ward, feeling the cold breath of the gaping mouth bearing down on him. After a moment, the details of the room shaped themselves in his periphery, and his gaze darted around, confused. He was...in his own bedroom. His own apartment. But how?

  Something...something had happened down there in the tunnels, some kind of violation. It wasn’t a physical assault, but rather, an invasion of his mind. He couldn’t be sure, but he felt sort of bruised inside his head, like someone had hurt him deeply. But he couldn’t remember anything beyond some hazy images which ignited such intense anxiety that he was okay with letting them sink below the surface of consciousness.

  He untangled the sheets from his legs and stood. He was still wearing the jeans and t-shirt he’d worn in the tunnel. He was missing a shoe, and the bottom of his sock was black. He had scratches all over his hands and his cheek throbbed.

  Wayne looked out the window, noted the daylight, and then glanced at his digital clock. 3:00. What day was it? How long had he been gone? Where was Warner? He had to be starving.

  He found the cat batting an empty food bowl, sloshing water onto the tiled kitchen floor. He immediately filled the bowl with kibble and fresh water, but when he went to pet Warner, the cat hissed at him. He drew back his hand, puzzled.

  He got himself a bottled water from the fridge and went back to the bedroom, to his desk. What he saw on it made him drop the bottle, its contents spilling in a tiny waterfall onto the floor.

  The book from the tunnel was there. La Claviére’s Book of Gates.

  Recovering himself, he swooped to pick up the water bottle and brought it sloshing to the desk. His fingers ran over the aged leather cover, then traced the letters of the title. Here it was, but why? Why had the chaotic ones brought him back, and why had they left the book there with him? He was fairly sure they didn’t tuck him into bed and then offer the very book he’d been looking for as a kind of apology. Did they want him to use it to close the gate? That was doubtful. That they were hoping he’d blunder blindly into opening another gate seemed more likely.

  He opened it, turning the old pages slowly so as not to tear them. Warner rubbed at his legs but he paid no attention. The words were occasional glimpses of lingual clarity in an otherwise storm of unfamiliar words and phrases, but the pictures told a lot. He counted about 13 plates in all. Whether La Claviére had drawn them or not, Wayne couldn’t tell; they weren’t initialed. Wayne suspected they were copied from the original manuscript parchments brought out of Egypt. One depicted a long table on which a woman was laying. Her mouth was slack, her eyes rolled upward, and from the back of her head, a long tube looped over a wooden frame and dripped into a large bottle. In another found in the chapter on keys, an assortment of men, women, and even children were shown strung upside-down over a large black pit over which a swirling black cloud was forming.

  There were brief mentions of les fantômes (ghosts) and les monstres (as side effects, he guessed from the text, of opening various gates). There were also supposed locations of the gates (Où Trouver des Emplacements de la Porte). What he found interesting about that chapter was, considering the supposed origin of the information dated back to ancient civilization, it was something akin to prescience that the author gave locations all over the globe.

  At least four of the plates had an odd quality uncharacteristic of the style they were usually drawn in. It was almost as if they had been done by artists who had never before encountered human people. One of them showed a black whirlpool surrounded by stars and overlaid with complex 3-dimensional symbols, while another showed three faceless figures pointing at wavy lines meant to indicate some type of ripple in the air. The third showed what looked to Wayne like an immense alien city hovering in the sky just below a smaller, far simpler village. The fourth one really chilled him, though—so much so that his shoulders shook the hairs on his arms and neck stood on end. He went to get a throw blanket off the couch and then returned to study it.

  In that plate, a large black chasm seemingly deep enough to reach hell had split the ground in a wooded clearing nearly in half. Rocks protruded from the insides like broken teeth. Scrabbling along those rocks were figures he had spent the last few days encountering both in subterranean tunnels and in nightmares. Their long fingers clawed at rocks and grass. Their mouths reflected in miniature the origin of their ascent. The ink of the drawing trailed their backs out behind them. The more he studied the picture, the more the image of those things made him shake.

  Those were the chaotic ones, crossing over from their world of madness. The caption, neither in French nor in English, simply read: Hinshing.

  It occurred to Wayne then that maybe the chaotic ones had left the book there for him to see what they were and what they could do. He tried to decipher the French on the pages surrounding that last book plate, and found what little he could pick up seemed to be about insanity and death. There was even mention of Le Diable, and he supposed to a 16th century mind, the chaotic ones would have appeared very much like demons. Hell, he thought. They’re very much like demons to this 21st century mind, too.

  He turned back to the Table of Contents to see if there was a chapter on closing gates that had been opened, but evidently, La Claviére wasn’t as interested in that. He found some mention toward the end of the book about opening other gates, but Wayne couldn’t tell whether that meant gates opening in the opposite direction to existing ones, or new gates inviting potentially worse monsters to this one. A portion of that chapter was composed of incredibly complex mathematical formulas and those same intricate symbols he’d seen written over the black hole plate. He thought the symbols might be some kind of hieroglyphics of the ancient language of the manuscripts, and if that were so, they might be the words used in the incantation to open a gate. All in all, just opening a gate looked to be a very complex and multi-stepped process. No wonder there was nothing about closing the gates. It appeared that symmetry and balance were important parts of the ritual; that much was suggested by another illustration that showed a scale weighing some of the symbols stacked atop body parts evenly against a vortex from which long tentacular appendages were climbing through. Any upset to the balance seemed to cause the ritual to fail.

  Wayne closed the book and shivered. He knew he couldn’t have gotten all those nuances from his limited French and his beginner’s perusing of occult illustrations. The chaotic ones had been feeding him interpretations and he had been too engrossed in the book to realize it. It made his head ache, thinking about them whispering with manic glee about gateways and alternate dimensions, about how most occult rituals in this world were no more insane than what they lived and breathed every day.

  He didn’t like their violation of his thoughts. It made him hypersensitive. Of course, overthinking it was making him tired and achy. In fact, his last thought before laying down on the couch with the blanket wrapped around him was that he thought he might be coming down with their sickness. Then he stared at the wall and ceased to think at all for a time. He just gave up and listened to the things the chaotic ones told him.

  ***

  The first place Derek thought to look for Myrinda was the Old Ward. Her fascination with it over the last several days had made it an obvious choice. If she’d wandered off in some kind of trance, she would have gone there, and if she were right about those things and they had taken her, they probably would have taken her there.

  Derek had always prided himself on being a man who thought things through before acting. In his experience, jumping blindly into a dangerous situation got people killed, and rarely put a man in a position to get a job done. He was not completely innocent of wild risk-taking when the situation warranted it, but in his mind, the risks were calculated. Derek was solidly aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and knew when to drive fast, to jump away, to tackle someone. It was h
is job to know, and he didn’t mind saying so himself that he did his job well.

  Therefore, it didn’t really surprise him to find seven distorted figures standing in front of the Old Ward, silhouetted by its bulk in the early rays of the rising sun. One opened its vertical mouth and a horrible, hysterical high whine descended into a growl. The hinshing, the chaotic ones, had come to greet him.

  Still, it was a shock to finally see physical proof of creatures he’d had a great deal of difficulty even entertaining as possible. They were, to him, the stuff of fever dreams—vaguely human-shaped, but clearly not human, their mottled skin slick and shining as they stepped into the daylight. They were humanoid, but completely hairless and sexless. The faceless heads worked their zipper mouths open and closed, chattering in a language he had never heard. Their backs, as well as the backs of their heads blurred out behind them, neither a solid part of them nor a vapor, but something oddly in between. Those heads twitched as they studied him with a kind of sociopathic curiosity. Their grotesquely long limbs spasmed and bent in ways limbs shouldn’t ever bend. When they stepped closer, their jittering bodies seemed to steal seconds so that the natural flow of movement was broken.

  He couldn’t go into that building and get Myrinda without knowing what he was up against. He was no good to Myrinda dead.

  That was when he’d decided to find Wayne.

  Down in the lobby, there was only one mail box assigned to someone with W as the first initial; a W. Tillingford of 2B.

  He considered taking the elevator, thought better of it, and jogged up the stairs to the second floor. Checking his smart phone for the time, he saw it was still early. 7:24 a.m. He’d have to get this Wayne guy out of bed. He didn’t have time to wait, and he didn’t think Myrinda did, either.

  He knocked loudly on the door to 2B.

  “Wayne Tillingford?” he called through the door. “I need your help.” He knocked again. There was no answer. He was about to pound on it a third time when he heard the sound of shuffling feet from inside.