by David Six
I managed to get to my knees, and then to my feet. The air around me stunk of urine and ammonia. I shook like I had a hundred and ten-degree fever.
It just stood there, in the corner of my basement, in the shadows where the light couldn’t reach.
No way could I calm down and think like a man, but I got myself to where I could at least look at it. The air was cold but I was hot, all at the same time. I felt like I had to puke.
I think it was looking at me.
I couldn’t see it very well. Like I said, it was in shadow, and it was just hard to make out for some reason. Kind of blurry, I guess.
“Ohh-uhh-unn-uh.”
“Aw, shit!” I yelped, and stumbled back.
The moan came from the thing! (Well, where else?) Its mouth had opened real wide, like wider than a person, but it was shaped like a person.
It was shaped like a girl.
“Who… who are you?” I managed to stammer.
No answer. It kept looking at me. Now I noticed it was holding its—her?—belly with one arm, like it—she?—had a stomach bug. She had on what looked like an old dress, or maybe it was just dirty and tattered, or—
No. It was covered with blood.
I don’t know how I saw that, because the rest of her was drained of color, like she was on an old black and white TV. But the blood, it was red, and it was wet—I could see it shining in spots, even though there wasn’t much light. The bottom part of her old dress was soaked in blood, like she had been bleeding from her belly—
Or maybe her hoo-hah.
“Ohh-uhh-unn-uh.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
I took two steps closer to her and looked. She still held her belly with one arm, and I suddenly felt a puff of chill air wash over me. I got the notion that the blood was from her baby, or from where her baby had been, or that someone had hurt her …
And her baby.
I squinted to try and make out her face. Her black hair was stringy and hung over her cheeks. She seemed to be looking at the floor, but it was hard to tell—the blood was the only thing I could see clearly. She looked blurry, like there was a sheet of dirty plastic or something between her and me.
Another step. “Are you hurt?” I asked. Yeah, that was a fucking stupid question to ask a ghost.
She looked at me. Her mouth opened, so wide it looked like a tunnel with the lights out.
“Ohh-uhh-unn-uh.”
Every time she did that, I felt my bowels try to loosen. I squeezed everything shut so I didn’t crap in front of this girl, ghost or not.
I was able to focus on her eyes—don’t know how, through the dirty plastic thing. They looked black, like the inside of her mouth, but glittery, like hunks of obsidian I saw when I was a kid on a school field trip to a museum.
I can’t say I was any less afraid, but she hadn’t made any moves to eat me, or tear out my heart or anything, so I moved a little closer. She just stood there, looking at me with those glinting eyes, stringy hair falling around her narrow little face.
“What happened to you, sweetheart?” I asked.
She held her belly and
“Ohh-uhh-unn-uh.”
“I know you’re hurting,” I said. “What happened to you?”
I went closer still, now just two feet away from her. The air felt thick around me, like I was a lot farther underground than just the basement. Still air, as if the room was sealed.
Like a tomb.
She cried, “Ohh-uhh-unn-uh.”
And doubled over, grabbing her belly.
I stood right in front of her, trying to see a way to help her. The dirty plastic wasn’t plastic, it was some kind of membrane. I could see fucking veins and shit running through it, now I was standing right up close. It was like I was inside a
“Ohh-uhh-unn-uh.”
She went to her knees, still holding her stomach with one arm. She reached out the other to me, her little white hand stretching, her fingers waggling like spider’s legs. I reached back, trying to get hold of her and maybe pull her out of that membrane.
I felt the tip of her finger touch mine and
I was looking at her through veins and sticky tissue. I was cold. And then I didn’t feel anything.
I was facing the basement light over the bottom step, the light that had been behind me, but was now in front of me.
I was in the corner.
She was out.
Her dress, her bloody dress, dried up and the blood pulled away from the fabric like it was sucking back inside her. Her color came back, her face rosy and bright. Her hair arranged around her head in curls.
She smiled at me.
And then she was gone.
I looked down at myself, looked at the stain of blood spreading from my crotch down my pajama legs and up over my belly.
I felt an ache start inside me, a pain that wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt. It wasn’t so much nerve endings reacting to an injury. It was an emptiness that spread from my belly and thudded through my entire body like I was being bruised from the inside out. I felt a loss like someone I loved had died. Like everyone I’d ever loved had died, all at once, and I knew I would never get over it.
But the loss was for one person, one small person, that I had created and knew I would never hold, never see again.
Ohh-uhh-unn-uh.
Corky’s Shadow
“Say hello to the nice boys and girls, Corky.”
“Why should I?”
“Now Corky, these little boys and girls came to this birthday party to see you, so how about it?”
“Well, okay, George, since you asked nice. Hi, boys and girls. How are you?”
“Mom! I wanna go play iPads!”
“Hush now, Johnny, and let Mister Brussy and Corky perform for you.”
“But Mom! I can see his lips moving!”
Sigh. “Just let Mister Brussy finish his little act, then you and your friends can play iPads.”
Little act? Missus Perkins wasn’t the only one who sighed, though George kept his to himself. He soldiered on, though he knew he had lost the small group of five-year-olds seated on the grass in front of him, three boys and four girls. The birthday boy himself, Johnny Perkins, had become very interested in a grub he’d dug out of the grass, and was completely ignoring George and Corky.
George ran through the remainder of his routine, and once he finished and Corky had said, “Goodbye, kids! Now go have some birthday cake!” the seven children leaped to their feet as if chains had been removed from their limbs.
Missus Perkins came up to him as the kids blasted through the patio door and into the house. He saw little Johnny pick up an iPad that looked like a billboard in his diminutive hands. All his friends clustered around him on the carpet as he opened some game and they began playing.
Johnny’s mom shook her head. “I am so sorry for Johnny’s behavior,” she said. “He just loves that iPad. We can never get him to put it down.”
Maybe take it away from him on occasion, George wanted to say, but didn’t. He accepted the check Missus Perkins handed him. “Thank you.”
She looked at him a moment. “It must be hard keeping kids’ attention these days, what with all the electronic distractions they have.”
Who lets them be distracted? George didn’t say out loud. “It has its challenges,” he said instead. He folded the check and slid it into his trouser pocket.
Missus Perkins reached out and touched Corky’s smooth wooden face. “My husband thought it would be fun for Johnny to see a real, honest-to-goodness ventriloquist and his dummy. He loves those old Edgar Bergen routines.” She frowned. “I always thought they were kind of creepy.” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh! I’m sorry!” She laid her hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t mean—”
He waved away her apology. “No need,” he said, his lower back complaining as he bent and placed Corky in the travelling case with the beige tweed
covering that was worn shiny in spots. “Thank you very much for hosting us today.”
He left the exquisitely manicured back yard through the same gate by which he had entered. After putting Corky’s case into the rear of his fifteen-year-old Chevy Aveo, he folded his long frame into the cramped front seat and turned the key. The car burped to life after a few whining turns of the starter, and he rattled away from the Perkins McMansion.
Back in his second-floor room at the Starlight Delight motel, he took Corky out of his case and sat the figure up against the bed’s headboard, then sank into the single armchair with the brown stain on the cushion like a stone dropping into a bucket. A listless fly buzzed around the forty-watt bulb in the lamp beside the chair.
He reached his long arm down to the floor and felt amid the grit and debris that was a permanent part of the carpet, till his extended fingers touched the brown paper bag lying beneath the chair. He pulled it out, removed the pint bottle of whiskey from the bag—“Old Sphincter”, as he thought of the bourbon; it stunk, but it got the job done—and poured several fingers worth into the clear plastic cup sitting on the round Formica-covered table next to the chair. He took a sip, then a gulp. The cheap booze sizzled down his gullet like a line of burning gasoline.
“George.”
He took another swig, looked at the empty cup, and refilled it. Probably he should get something to eat; he hadn’t bothered to stay for cake or snacks at little Johnny’s party. He looked out the window onto the parking lot, scenic with the three old cars with their spidered windshields, and Ilsa, the crack whore from the room next door, down on her reddened knees on the concrete giving some guy a hummer in the alcove beside the ice machine.
“George!”
The cushion in the old chair had hosted a lot of asses, some of them quite large, judging by the buttock-shaped sag in the center of the pad. In a way, it was comforting, that so many derelicts at the end of their careers—or their lives—had ended up in this very room, buttocks to this same seat. He was in good, albeit despairing, company.
“George!”
“George!”
“GeorgeGeorgeGeorgeGeorge!”
“Geezus, Corky! What?”
Silence. Oh great, he was pouting. “All right, I’m sorry, Corky.” He could hear the hum of the air conditioner in the crack whore’s room next door. “I said I was sorry.”
Corky punished him a moment longer, then said, “What’s to become of us, George?”
George pulled his gaze away from the window—fascinating though Ilsa was to watch at her work—and looked at Corky. His vent figure regarded him, his eyes slid sideways in his wooden head.
“I don’t know, Cork,” George admitted. “I’ve thoroughly fucked up our lives.”
“Now George, don’t say that,” Corky soothed, his jaw clacking as he spoke.
George drained his cup of the foul brown rotgut and grimaced. “Let’s tick off the reasons, shall we?”
“No, let’s not do that again—”
“I was married for three months when I was twenty-three. She took my nut and ran off. I had a kid’s show on Channel 41 in Kansas City for nine months, until they cancelled us for something more edgy—which turned out to be reruns of Speed Racer. I played one of the small casinos in Vegas for eighteen months, until Batshit—or whatever his name was—”
“Bigsy,” Corky offered helpfully.
“Until Bigsy decided I was putting it to his old lady. Like I’d touch that old showgirl skank—”
“Kindness is a virtue, George.”
“And we just made it out of town with our lives.” George regarded Corky. “Well, my life.”
“That again?” Corky flicked his eyes back and forth; the closest he could come to rolling them in disgust. “I don’t know any more about why I’m the way I am than you do.”
“Yeah, well.” George refilled his cup and took another drink. The cheap whiskey made his belly feel like it was the hottest part of a tire fire, but his head was getting comfortably numb.
“I don’t like it when you drink so much and get depressed,” Corky said.
“I don’t like it either.”
“Then stop.”
“And do what?” George slipped his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled forth the check Missus Perkins had given him, opened it, waved it in Corky’s direction. “One hundred twenty-five dollars, Cork. That, added to the eighty-three dollars and seventy-nine cents we have, is the sum total of our nut.”
“Did you put an ad on Craigslist?”
“I don’t know how to work a computer.”
“I said I would show you.”
“How would that look, Cork?” George said. “You sitting on my lap at the library, instructing me which of the bloody buttons to push?”
“The librarian would help.”
George made a sound like he was spitting, but didn’t. “I asked. She looked at me like I was from another planet. She said When I’m done shelving books. I didn’t like her.”
“You used to like everybody.”
“Yeah, well, everybody didn’t used to be assholes.”
“Um…”
“No.”
“But George—”
“I said no. We aren’t having this discussion again.”
“But if you’d just reconsider—”
George slammed the plastic cup down on the Formica tabletop; the cup cracked, the whiskey bubbling as it took on the grime coating the tabletop in a battle to the death.
“I said no! What do you think would happen if people found out what—who—what you are? They wouldn’t find it charming, or entertaining. They’d have you whisked off to some military installation where they’d dissect you like you were some little green alien.”
“You’ve watched too many fifties paranoia movies, George.”
“Hazard of being born in the forties.”
“But we could be careful. Just imagine how amazed people would be if we did some of the tricks we’ve worked up, with me talking while you are sealed in a crate, or something?”
“Corky,” George said, the warm feeling of the booze galloping away, to be replaced by a familiar weariness. “I can’t take a chance on losing you.”
Corky said nothing for several moments. “You won’t lose me, George.”
George let go a sigh that felt like he’d breathed out his bones. “Corky, you are too trusting. Things aren’t the way they used to be when we first started. People these days are… unkind.”
“Not all of them.” Corky’s painted eyes looked at George with a depth greater than that of most people he knew. “We would be very careful in setting up our routines.” When George said nothing, Corky prodded, “George, look at the check from Missus Perkins. That and the eighty-three dollars and seventy-nine cents is all we have. That won’t last more than a week—maybe two, if you only eat once a day and don’t drink. And then what?”
George stared at the floor. “You’re too fucking practical.”
Corky made that chuckling noise that sounded like a Chihuahua being tickled. “That’s why you need me.”
George shook his head. “Okay, let’s say we run with your idea. How would we work it?”
“We’d have to start small. Anyone who knows you would be… er, startled to discover such a huge overnight leap in talent.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Sorry. Simple things at first, like the old water glass trick, but from across the stage. Then we work up from there, you sealed in a crate, or at the back of the audience, or even outside on the street.”
“I’m not letting you out of my sight. I’m going to make sure no one tries to grab you.”
“Okay, we’ll stick a pin in that last one.” Corky opened his jaw a moment, and closed it; it was his way of pursing his lips. “So. What do you think?”
They had talked about all this before, and George had been adamant that Corky would not expose himself to t
he world. But now, looking down at the measly check in his hands—the last gig he’d managed to line up for them—things seemed much more desperate. And when he heard Ilsa bang open her door the next room over, and three male voices booming at her to get on the bed, he sighed again.
“Okay, let me sleep on it. I’m too buzzed to make decisions now.”
“George—”
George held up his hand. “I’m not saying no, Cork. Just let me get some sleep.”
“Sure, George. You get some sleep. I’ll stand guard.”
George laughed, even though it was an old joke of Corky’s—his vent figure had never needed sleep. Or food. Or anything else, it seemed, other than good company. George hoped he had at least provided that to his best friend over their decades together.
Corky was considerate enough to keep quiet while George pondered. Maybe—if they were very careful—George might consider doing Corky’s plan. But if he lost his friend… It wasn’t even the money— Okay, it was partly the money, but ninety-nine point nine nine nine of it was that he would not allow his friend to be used as a lab experiment.
Not ever.
He must have fallen asleep there in the butt-saggy chair, because when he came awake with a start, it was dark outside. As dark as it could be, with three big light poles in the parking lot, one of which had become misaligned when some kids had thrown rocks at it, and it shone its ten million watts straight through his window.
That must have been what had awakened him.
He checked his watch. The phosphorescent hands on the ancient Timex said it was four-twenty-three in the morning. His stomach growled, reminding him that he’d not eaten since the sandwich yesterday from the vending machine at the laundromat on the corner, before his gig at the Perkins’ house.
He glanced over at Corky, who had his eyes closed. He smiled; Corky didn’t sleep, but he was able to put himself into a kind of trance where he shut out the physical world for a while.
George shifted his gaze back to the window and the quiet parking lot, then frowned. Something…
