Sarah started to move away from the table, but her mother’s hand sprang out and clamped her around the wrist. The old woman’s fingers were bony but strong.
“Please,” she said in a husky voice. “Don’t go yet.”
“Look, Mom, I—”
“I want to tell you something.”
“What?” Sarah said impatiently. “What is it?”
Yes, the old woman thought. What? What are you going to tell her? What can you say that will make any kind of sense? She can’t understand. A few years ago, if somebody had told you, would you have believed her?
“Well?” Sarah said, with a mixture of annoyance and concern.
“It’s nothing, dear, nothing really. Just ... I love you, Barbara.”
Sarah’s face fell. “I love you too, Mom,” she said.
Darkness. The old woman lay in her bed, curled up like a fetus, pores sweating and her body shivering from the midnight cold. She waited, knowing he was coming, if not this minute then the next, or the one after that, or—
Was that a sound?
She could hear the noise of the wind and rain battering the window from behind the drapes, but over that, she thought she heard something else.
Like the creak of the front door being pushed open.
No, just her imagination. Ghosts don’t use doors. Or did they? And who said he was a ghost? She didn’t know what he was, where he came from. It didn’t matter.
She curled herself tighter, becoming a human ball, as if she could make herself so small she’d be lost in the vast blackness.
The waiting was the worst. Knowing he was coming and not knowing how long. The nights seemed to stretch endlessly, each one taking a few more seconds of the day, and soon there would be no more sunlight, only this dark, both inside her head and out.
The soft tread of feet along the parquet floor of the hallway. She was old and her senses had dulled over the years, but she could hear well enough to know. It was him. He was coming. Finally.
Fear tightened her throat. The old woman told herself that she would ignore him this time. She wouldn’t tell him her secrets, not any more. Because once you told him your secrets he kept them. Forever.
She felt rather than saw the doorknob being turned, and her body stiffened as she watched the door yawn wide. She could only barely glimpse the outline of his body as he emerged from the fabric of the night.
No, please not tonight go away go away I’m a poor old woman why won’t you leave me alone—
“Hello.” His voice was soft, but she heard it clearly; its cold penetrated to her marrow.
A million miles away, rain drummed at the window.
“Hello, Marian.” She didn’t ask how he knew her name. Of course he knew. Soon, he would know everything, and she, nothing.
“Would you like to talk?”
No, she thought. I don’t. But the dark was so huge, so lonely, and she was a frightened child lost within it. Only he could save her from the darkness, he who was the darkness.
Don’t! a more primitive part of her mind screamed. Don’t! He’s just playing games with you, he’s making you feel like that, he—
But she ignored that voice, drowned it.
“Would you like to talk?” he repeated.
“Yes,” the old woman said. “I would.”
“Tell me something, then.”
“Where should I begin? There’s so much ...”
“Anywhere. Tell me anything. We’ve got plenty of time.”
She considered this. “Did I ever tell you about the trip Herman and I took to California?”
“I don’t believe so,” he said.
She opened her mouth, and before she could even think, the words fell from her lips, one after the other, like anxious children tumbling over each other’s heels.
MAMA’S BOY by C.S. Fuqua
Everyone could see where Carl Baker was headed, even me. After two years on his belly in Vietnam, Carl had come home with a habit most people called “a shame.” They’d shake their heads, say, “It’s terrible, but I hear a lot of ’em get hooked over there,” and go on about their business, figuring that sooner or later he’d get his head together and body clean. After all, he had his mother. In time, with her help, he’d be fine.
I was twelve then. We lived in a remote northern part of the county directly across a pond from the Baker house. I saw Carl nearly every day, walking around the pond, hands in pockets, glassy eyes staring into the ripples of the water. I’d stand beside him sometime for upwards of half-an-hour before he’d acknowledge me. Then we’d toss a football or take a walk through the woods. He’d tell me about the women he’d been with in ’Nam and the great drugs he got his hands on there. But, when he was with me, he never consumed anything other than water or an occasional beer. My presence, I suppose, was good enough. Maybe he saw something special in me, maybe the childhood he’d lost in war, I don’t know. In those days, though, I was his only friend.
Out of politeness, I’d ask how his mother was getting on, and he’d shrug, his face going cold, unreadable, say, “Okay.” I don’t know if he really liked his mother or not. A frail, brittle woman, she returned after forty years of nursing when Carl returned home, hoping I suppose, to devote her remaining years in service to Carl’s needs, but Carl didn’t need much—a few bucks, a fix, and a patch of grass to lie on as he drifted into oblivion. One day, he didn’t come back. Too much smack slammed into his brain, leaving him a vegetable.
A month after Carl’s OD, Mrs. Baker took him home from the hospital. Mom stopped by the house a couple of times, but Mrs. Baker never invited her inside, talking instead from the front porch for a few minutes before returning to her son. Mom said she admired Mrs. Baker’s determination, but she wondered if the old lady was physically capable.
Over the next few months, I rarely saw Mrs. Baker. She ordered all her groceries and medicines delivered, each paid for at the door. I once saw a man with a black satchel—a doctor, I assumed—get out of a blue Buick and go inside, but, as far as I know, after the doctor’s single visit, no one but Mrs. Baker ever saw her son.
By Valentine’s Day, Carl crossed my mind only when I looked out my bedroom window to see lights from the Baker house shimmering on the pond. I’d get images of him lying in bed and start to feel trapped. I’d turn away, slide into bed, making a tent with the covers, and lose myself in my school books as Mom and Dad downstairs watched Johnny Carson.
One warm night in early March, I had begun to nod off when something hit my bedroom’s outer wall. Faint laughter drifted up from the TV. I sat up as another knock sounded against my window. I slipped out of bed, over to the glass. Pale light glittered on the pond. Carl’s face, twisted in agony, flickered in my mind, the image abruptly vanishing as footsteps started up the stairs. I slipped back into bed, settling as the door opened and Mom looked in. A few minutes later, I drifted into sleep, figuring the knocks against my wall were nothing more than pine cones falling from the tree outside my window.
Two nights later, it happened again, a solid knock, like knuckles rapping, not pine cones. I searched the darkness, saw nothing but the single light in the Baker house. I turned away from the window, froze. A bump against the outer wall. Then again, and again, a gradual progression around the side wall, the inner wall, to my door.
“Mom?” I whispered, Thump. “Dad?”
I crossed the room to the door, jerked it open as Mom turned toward me at the head of the stairs.
“What are you doing up, young man?”
“I—uh ...” What could I tell her? My room was twenty feet off the ground. Who’d believe me? “I need to pee,” I said.
Back in bed, I expected the knocking to start again, but what came were screams. Faint, guttural groans, ending in suffocating shrieks. I twisted out of bed and hit the door at a run.
“Mom! Dad!” I took the stairs in twos. They bolted from the den, their faces drained. I raced back to my room, my parents following. Mom switched on the light.
They glanced around the room, their questioning gazes falling finally to me at the window.
“Listen,” I said in a hushed voice.
“To what?” Dad said irritably.
Frogs croaked at the pond. Night birds chirped. “Somebody was screaming.”
A roll of the eyes.
“I swear!”
Dad shook his head, left the room. Mom paused in the doorway, flipped off the light. “Just a bad dream, honey. Back to bed. It’s late.” A few minutes later, the TV downstairs silenced, and I heard my parents’ bedroom door at the end of the hall softly close. Then came faint music from their radio, masking the random sounds of night from their room. Sometime later, the screams started again, faint, muffled. I wrapped the pillow around my head and began to hum.
The following night, nothing banged against my walls, but the screams began as Carson set into his monologue.
I called for my parents, but only Mom came. She sat on my bedside, listened for a few moments, then lay her palm against my forehead. “Is something bothering you, Kevin? You need to talk to somebody?”
Great. She thought I was a nut case. Next stop, the base psychiatrist, one of those convenient military freebies. Dad, a Navy machinist, had three years left before retirement, and Mom was determined to use any service she didn’t have to pay for. I was glad I’d kept my mouth shut about the slaps against the wall. She tucked me in and left me lying in a pale, steel-gray shaft of moonlight. A quarter-hour passed; another. Then screams. The television audience cackled.
Every night, anguished shrieks echoed across the pond. Mom and Dad could not hear them, secured in their bedroom at the front of the house, the radio playing softly within. I would sink deeper under the covers, wrapping my pillow around my head until sleep finally overtook me.
The following week, Dad shipped out on the Lexington for a month’s sea duty. The night he left, a rapid slapping circled the walls of my room, ending with a bang against my door. Mom shouted from downstairs, “Kevin! Go to sleep!” Then came the screams, more anguished than ever. Gooseflesh waltzed up my neck. I threw off the covers, stomped downstairs, grabbed Mom’s hand and pulled her toward my room, ignoring her demands of “What’s going on?”
“Listen,” I said as we entered.
“Is this about ...?”
“Mom, please, just listen”
With a reluctant sigh, she leaned out the window beside me. Nothing. She pulled back in, shaking her head sadly. Poor boy, her eyes said. Abruptly, her expression changed. She snapped around, her mouth unhinged. Nightmarish shrills snaked through pines and oaks. She glared across the pond at the Baker house. A moment later, she fled to her room to call the police.
She hung up, came into my doorway, slipping on a windbreaker. “I’m going over to the Bakers’, Kevin. You stay here.”
As soon as I heard the car door slam shut, I yanked on my jeans and tennis shoes, slipped out of the house, circled the pond and skirted through Mrs. Baker’s back yard. A police car pulled into the front yard, followed by Mom’s car. I crept up to the only lighted window and peeked in, gasping as my gaze briefly met Carl Baker’s. Something stirred behind those dilated, milky pools, a sense of relief, of gratefulness.
His room door swung open. A tall, uniformed policeman stepped in, his expression sickening. Mrs. Baker pushed by, placing herself between him and her son. Beyond the officer, Mom waited in the hallway. The policeman turned away, and I heard him mutter that he’d radio for an ambulance. Mom backed away from the door as Mrs. Baker knelt beside the bed and began to stroke the sweating brow of her son. His head rolled side to side, tongue waggling between his lips. Mrs. Baker began to cry, pressing her cheek to his shoulder.
I crouched below the windowsill until the ambulance arrived. I rose cautiously as two attendants situated a stretcher beside the bed, positioning themselves at Carl’s head and feet to transfer him. They threw off the yellow spotted sheet, both pausing momentarily, eyes widening at the cadaverous chest heaving gray and crinkled, skin sinking between ribs with every struggled breath. Cloth strips bound Carl’s thin and brittle wrists and ankles to the bedposts. Scabbing flesh clung to the catheter running from his penis into the urine bag at the foot of the bed.
One attendant narrowed his eyes, swallowed, then transferred the urine bag to the gurney while the other untied Carl’s bindings. The man at Carl’s head slipped his hands under Carl’s shoulders as the other lifted Carl’s knees.
Mrs. Baker cried, “He belongs here!” The policeman held her gently back as the attendants lifted her son. Carl shrieked mindlessly during the brief instant he floated from bed to gurney, bottom sheet stuck to his backside.
My mother’s face turned ashen. She spun away and vomited.
The attendants dropped Carl, causing him to writhe and shriek as thousands of tiny roaches skittered from underneath him to race down the gurney’s legs. Carl flailed his arms and legs helplessly as the roaches burrowed out from folds of sheet and skin. His back and buttocks had become a massive bed sore, developing and healing repeatedly until the bottom sheet had grown into his skin. The policeman glared in disbelief and disgust at the bed where Carl had lain unmoved for months. A thick mass of tiny roaches scurried in fear of the light.
I spun away in a tripping, tumbling run home, scratching my hands, ripping my jeans. I entered through the garage and made it to my bedroom window as the ambulance pulled out of Mrs. Baker’s yard. Mom’s car was the next to leave, and, finally, the policeman’s. I tried to shake Carl’s tormented image from my mind, but could only soften it by thinking of Carl’s eyes, the way they had somehow thanked me.
I undressed quickly and was in bed by the time Mom came upstairs. She opened my door, and I knew she was looking in at me, probably wondering how a mother could subject her son to such horror, but love can be far more cruel than hatred. She closed the door softly, and, a few minutes later, I heard her retching in the bathroom.
She woke me as dawn slivered through the trees and bathed the pond in gray iciness. She sat on my bedside, looking frail, drained. She reached back, took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Poor, poor man”
The state placed Carl in a long-term convalescent home, his care VA funded. As for Mrs. Baker, she stayed in her house. No charges were filed, but, in the long run, it didn’t matter. In June, the same policeman who’d answered Mom’s call about the screams found Mrs. Baker dead.
Twelve years later, lung cancer killed my dad. And last summer, a drunk murdered Mom in a head-on crash. I moved back to this house last October. The Baker place across the pond is still standing, but kids have shattered all the windows, and termites have weakened the structure so that it sags in the middle.
After that terrible night, I tried to forget Carl, but, lately, I can’t get him off my mind. Maybe it’s because I see that old house every day; maybe not. In any case, I’m sure he’s still alive, although I have no idea where he’s living. I must find out. And soon.
Last night, frenzied knocking rattled the outer wall of my old bedroom.
THE SHABBIE PEOPLE by Jeffrey Osier
1
Their skin was smooth and colorless, so translucent that it looked like a liquid held in place by a thin, glutinous membrane. The long, loose threads along the edges of their shapeless garments seemed to wave in synchronized patterns, like cilia or some delicate reef-dwelling invertebrate. Even now I believe the Shabbies were human beings, although it seems as time goes on, that I base this conviction more and more on a desperate hope that has less to do with them—or even her—than it does with the way I cling to the notion of my own humanity.
I had a job in those days. Five days a week I rode the “L” train downtown, where I immediately took a narrow set of stairs down to Lower Wacker Driver, a bleak dust-blanketed stretch of road that ran directly beneath Wacker Drive proper and alongside the Chicago River. It was not a short cut—in fact, it added a good five minutes to my walk—and the only practical excuse I had for preferring it to a
shorter, street level route was that it was cooler in summer and warmer (because of the heating vents from the buildings) in winter. But I walked Lower Wacker for a different reason entirely—for the darkness, the solitude. At street level I would have been no better than the rest of the office workers and clerks: in a hurry to get to work or to their trains, all milling and colliding and seething beneath the screeching elevated trains.
On Lower Wacker I’d seen transients scattered along the catwalk, many asleep between scraps of newspaper and cardboard in the early morning. Otherwise there were only those few commuters who parked their cars in the designated spaces between the catwalk and the street itself. Occasionally a car would slow and the driver—hoping to claim a parking space—would ask if I was going to my car. I would cast the driver an accusing, condescending glare and simply say, “I don’t drive.”
I would look up at the concrete ceiling and listen for the sounds of heavier traffic flowing above, but I never heard it. Sometimes that ceiling seemed to be a mile or more thick, and the blackest, sootiest patches on it the entrances to vast, inaccessible caves.
On the morning I first encountered them I was going down the steps when I saw a haggard old man with worried eyes waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Before I even made it to the bottom he was talking to me. I averted my eyes and attempted to pass him by, but he held out a shaking hand to block my path.
It was then that he said the word, not as part of a sentence, but just as a single, exhausted exclamation: “Shabbie.”
As I attempted to sidestep him, I lost my balance and nearly fell onto the dusty, glass and ratshit-laden sidewalk. I cursed the old man and continued on my way.
I knew what he’d been talking about as soon as I saw them. There were about twenty on that first day: men and women—none of them standing any closer than ten feet from each other—on the catwalk, among the parked cars at the foot of the catwalk, even along the edges of the road. They didn’t look at anything except each other, with vacant, expressionless faces, hands deep in their pockets, hugging shapeless garments around themselves. There were a few more street people hovering along the edge of this strange, scattered group. They whispered to each other, laughed, complained, but refused to pass beyond a certain point into that arena where the brown-ragged strangers stood so silently, so oblivious to anything but each other.
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