by Martin Rose
“Quoth the raven, nevermore,” I intoned ominously.
He was warming himself in the early morning sun breaking over the horizon. They sun themselves in solitude. None of this explained why he had chosen my porch. Other than a few gallons of blood soaked into the wood, there was no reason for him to be here. The garbage men had dutifully disposed of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers. There were plenty of pastel-colored houses in this neighborhood done in the style of the Levittown suburbs in which he could make his home. Abandoned McMansions made obsolete in the housing boom and bust.
“Shoo,” I said, waving my new hand at him. He stared at me with an air of boredom. Clearly, I did not inspire feelings of fear or authority in the large bird. He smelled of ripe carrion. Then again, it was probably me.
“Fine.”
I ignored the bird and he closed his beady, sphinx eyes as though he were exhausted with the effort of putting up with me.
Inside the darkness, I knew my home by memory, every step and bend. While most people raised in these urban environments are happy to go the rest of their lives without weaponry as a permanent fixture, I kept caches of weapons and ammo stored all over the house, a holdover from my military training. After a prolonged treasure hunt through my late wife’s china cabinet, I withdrew a brand new Glock 19.
Old-style revolvers looked nice, but I preferred a weapon that had been updated since the invention of the wheel. I leaned toward semi-automatics. Nobody wants to load bullets into six chambers while a maniac is trying to cut your head off with a chainsaw just because the revolver looked “pretty.” You’ll be pretty dead with bullets in your hand.
I holstered the weapon and with it came a feeling of homecoming, as though I had been made whole where before had only been emptiness. It rode against my rotted flesh, and I approached the table where I had abandoned Owen’s journal amidst a litter of crumpled paper, used-up pens, and bullets. My new hand was slightly larger than my old one, like an ill-fitting glove, and I sent the book to the floor in an aborted attempt to pick it up.
I cursed, hoping the grip would not affect my ability to wield the gun in the future as poorly as this, and managed to pick up the journal off the floor on the second try. The house was a mess, and I wondered what sort of maid service I could arrange. Slightly undead guy, needs gentle house cleaning, formaldehyde. Doesn’t like flies. Provide references.
I snagged the journal by the spine and a paper spilled out from the pages.
“What a cliché,” I muttered. “Let me guess, it’s a napkin with a bar name conveniently stamped on it, or a phone number leading me to a smarmy villain intent on destroying all life on Earth as we know it, with a penchant for over-explaining his plans while he ties me up with poorly knotted rope.”
I slid the paper off the floor, but it wasn’t paper, and as far as clues go, true to life, it was piss poor. I enjoy movies, flickering black-and-white images of sleepy-eyed detectives and their hourglass dames, but rarely does life emulate the old films.
In real life, crime is a dirtier animal. People get away with murder more often than not, the femme fatales are definitely not shaped like Rita Hayworth. In fact, the men and women alike wear the scars of their ugly existence. If they are thieves or scoundrels driven by lives of poverty, they look twice as old as they are; if they are rich criminals, they look like well-kept thoroughbreds, rotting from the inside out.
Sometimes they’re sloppy enough to follow movie clichés, like dropping matchbooks with names on them, which never happens.
What fell to the floor was none of these. A tarot card.
It’s never something banal either. I couldn’t get the Nine of Swords or the Prince of Wands, could I?
Death.
A cloaked skeleton, the classic medieval image of the plague. The scythe rested against his shoulder, a tired figure, in the midst of a field of grain. MORT was written in Old English script at the bottom, as though I needed instruction on the figure whom I shared so much with—we were practically long-lost brothers.
My dead wife used to keep plastic bags in the drawer, and though I had exterminated so many traces of her feminine mystery, her soft memories, the kitchen had never been my forté, and even less so now that I would never eat there again. I found one from my living years, and stuffed the card inside the plastic, slipping the “evidence” into my breast pocket.
From the corner of my eye, the vulture flew past the window, startled into flight and abandoning my porch. Reflex moved me in response, instinctual memory. Only when I looked down did I realize the firearm was in my hand, the first round chambered and held at the door, my jaw clenched, my milky eye aiming with ferocious focus.
Ding dong!
Two long shadows cast over my door, and I frowned, watching a moment before I holstered the weapon and came to see what fresh hell was this.
*
I opened the door, jangling the chain stretched taut across the threshold, giving us an inch to stare at each other.
They stood like chickens, with the same eager-to-please emptiness in their eyes. For a moment, I thought Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had been re-animated, put back together like sloppy puppets. A moment staring at their stretched smiles, their expectant faces, and I realized they were a different couple, but with the same haunting hallmarks—the man wore a sweater vest like Rick Rogers, and the woman beside him donned a long skirt down to her ankles, a look that echoed the previous Rogers.
Two seconds of a flat stare transmuted into confusion, and seconds more followed as their cognition overtook their senses—for them to recognize, at last, the smell wafting from me and the diamond-plate texture of my face. I was used to seeing the same insidious terror in Jamie’s eyes. How do you keep a poker face when a corpse answers the door? How do you stare into his cloudy, milky gaze?
I had yet to find it in Niko’s.
I pushed that uncomfortable thought away and addressed my new visitors.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The woman blinked as though I’d hammered her over her head with my fist. Her husband was remote and aloof, as though he were a foreigner who did not understand the language.
“I’m Mrs. Rogers!” she exclaimed and stuck out a hand in greeting.
Her enthusiasm took me aback. How many Rogers were there in this godforsaken town?
I slammed the door in her face, undid the chain, and opened it wide. Her hand still wavered in the air, and I offered her my cold, waxen corpse hand. She was good, but not good enough to conceal the shudder as she folded warm fingers into my spongy, moldy grip. Even the thick ringlets of her dyed red hair shook with her.
“Let me guess,” I said, “Mr. Rogers, right?”
I offered him my hand. I haven’t eaten in ten years, but sarcasm was on the menu today.
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” he insisted, plunging his hands into his pants pockets. Clearly, he was the smarter of the two.
“What brings you to my door?”
Ordinarily, I’d hound them for a reference, but I was intrigued. I was the player on a stage in which the script had been written, and I was curious to know what my lines were supposed to be.
Let me guess, I thought, supplying the dialogue. We’re here looking for our son.
“Our son is missing,” the woman spoke cheerily, shrugging her purse from her shoulder and rummaging through it before producing the picture. Rings on her fingers reflected light into my face. A buzzing sound emanated from her purse and I stared until a fly wriggled over the lip of her zipper like an onyx bead before flying off.
I half expected a different picture, but she offered me the exact same one hanging on my fridge: happy, gap-toothed “Clay.”
“Keep it,” I suggested. “I’ve got one just like it.”
“Oh,” she said, her lips pursing. She stained them red, a 1940s starlet red, but it clashed with her skin tone so what should have been alluring looked like a blood smear instead. “We miss our son and would give anything to have him back, Mr. Adamson.
Can you help us?”
The wires in my jaw made an audible, metallic snick as I smiled—Gods, the effort!—and Mr. Rogers flinched. I was dead, but I still had my teeth, punctuating my grin with an uneven, serrated edge.
“Anything at all, Mrs. Rogers?”
“Name your price, we’ll be happy to pay it.”
“Can you get blood out of everyday household items?”
*
Mr. and Mrs. Rogers Redux, as I came to think of them, blinked in the same fashion as the ones who came before them. When they spoke, they were as wooden actors reciting lines from a poorly written play. I could have grilled them with a series of questions, something along the lines of, “How many more Rogers are there, exactly?” or the more direct, “Why are you people fucking with me?” but if there’s anything you learn dealing with shady people is they only answer direct questions with so many mangled lies you’re better off with no answer at all.
Judging by the set of Mrs. Rogers’s mouth, my reaction had not been expected; they were unprepared to deal with a monster like me.
I repeated my demand.
“That’s what I said. If you want me to help you, you’re going to have to live with me and clean my house.”
They were in no position to refuse. If they were systematically being sent here, logic followed that they were under orders and they could not refuse. They’d say yes, and when they did, they’d be under my watch and care. If my goal was to gain my son back and Mr. and Mrs. Rogers would not willingly help me, by keeping them close I could draw the mysterious masked shooter closer. Close enough to trap.
“Oh, I’m not sure . . .”
I sidestepped to the windowsill, where I picked up a bottle of ammonia spray and turned, depositing it into Mr. Rogers’s hands.
“Thanks! You start today.”
Mr. Rogers looked at the bottle as though it were an object he had never laid eyes on, and after a moment, he turned to the window, picked up a discarded rag, and wiped down the glass without a word of protest.
Mrs. Rogers looked at me, strangling refusals. She wanted to say no, but whatever her orders were, they left no room for rebellion. She swallowed it and waited for me.
“Any good with a power washer?”
*
If they were unsettling in conversation, they were more so in action. They moved like puppets or automatons. Even I had more life in my bones. I did paperwork at a desk—taxes—but it afforded me a better opportunity to watch them as they went about the business of setting my house to rights, dusting old knickknacks that once belonged to Jessica, unsettling years’ worth in accumulating layers of skin cells, hair, and cigarette smoke as they went. I got the impression that in the world where they lived, house work was not a priority—or perhaps they did not live in houses but survived in underground caverns akin to Morlocks.
They did a well enough job, though common objects mystified them, particularly in the kitchen. They opened closets and looked at my suits as though they were tourists at a zoo, pondering a new species exhibit. I showed Mr. Rogers how to make a bed. He touched the sheets with a sense of confusion that left me wondering if he had ever slept in a bed at all.
When they were done, I sensed them moving about me, like children trying to get a parent’s attention. Daddy, are we done yet? Light flickered over the television screen. Lana Turner slinked across the frame, curls and all, in black-and-white glory.
“If you got nothing else to do, I need you to stay here. I have extra rooms. It’s not like I use them.”
“Mr. Adamson,” the woman began, protesting. “We just need you to look for our son—”
“Then you have to stay here.”
Her breath huffed out of her in exasperation, a rare display of emotion. I did not turn around, but listened, curious. I couldn’t force them to stay, but I wondered how badly they needed me. How far I could push them and how much I could make them dance before they gave up.
“But I . . .” her words hung in the air as she struggled to find the right excuse, the right reason, before she faded into silence. Was it that hard to tell me to go fuck myself?
“Make yourself comfortable. You like old movies, eh? Either of you?”
After a moment, while Mrs. Rogers was busy swallowing her dialogue, Mr. Rogers settled into the chair next to me and watched Lana Turner with quiet admiration.
“Yeah, I know,” I spoke into the silence. “She’s a babe.”
*
I began the evening ritual of locking down the house. From one door to another I drifted, checking the locks and slanting my weightless shadow across windows. A faded ghost in my moth-eaten suit, ever thinning into two-dimensional space.
“What now?” Mr. Rogers asked in his quiet, strangled voice. I got the impression that either he had taken a vow of silence at his day job or chose not to speak at all. His voice sounded disused.
“That’s right,” I mused. “You need to sleep.”
One of those human necessities I had all but forgotten. I already had the television schedule for the night plotted out like a sailor’s navigational course and my dreams determined by an idiot box.
I found the linen closet, not sure what I would discover when I opened the door. I hadn’t opened it in years. A puff of dust exhaled from within, and I pulled out several old blankets and thrust them into Mr. Roger’s hands. He and his wife followed me like they were checking into a seedy motel, frightened and wary, taking the linens I offered.
“This way.”
I led them down the hall. Was it me, or did my steps become heavier as I went, a shuffling in my gait?
I reached the end, until there was nowhere else for me to go, to escape to. The door was as cold, as immovable as a mausoleum door.
After my wife and son had died, I had resumed my residence at the house we had bought together. I’m not sure if I can call what I did grieving—I was dead, all the way through to my rotten heart, with a rotten soul to match. I refused to touch the room that had been our master bedroom, where Jessica had first found me, boiling inside my own skin on that night. It was also the room where we had laid together with our fingers interlaced, the bed we shared on our wedding night, a collection of a thousand moments strung together with kisses, hungry yearnings. The ordinary fable of doomed, ordinary love.
I had not slept there since.
A team of scientists and military personnel had scrubbed the place from top to bottom; Jamie had seen to it that when I returned I need not be confronted by the brutal reminder of that bloody evening. But in a pale, afternoon light in winter, one can make out the faded blood stains embedded in the carpet nubs, the drywall. No amount of bleach and elbow grease could erase the past, and it persisted still, like cheap perfume in a strip club.
Clay’s room was no different. Barely evolved past a nursery, a smaller bed had been set up for when he had outgrown his crib, still adorned with the trappings of early childhood: the trendy cartoon of the moment, a cat and a mouse capering across the walls and onto the sheets and the bedding as well. The coverlet turned down, waiting for a boy to slumber who never arrived.
A coldness penetrated the atmosphere here, pushing through the walls and into my skin.
“I’m sure you can make do,” I snapped, and left them hovering in the hallway, exchanging glances from one room to another and then between themselves.
Zzzzt. Zzzzzzzt.
A fly whipped past my face and settled against the curling wallpaper in the hallway. I stopped and stared at it. My house never had flies, but lately I encountered them with greater frequency. In the land of the living, this is a minor nuisance. To a dead guy like myself, it’s a fucking apocalypse. I didn’t like to think about what an infestation of maggots would do to me.
It helicoptered in a semi-circle, transparent wings vibrating as it tasted the dusty wall.
“Eat me,” I muttered and crushed it. Sheetrock gave beneath my fist. The blackened, squashed body fell to the floor and I stared before returning to La
na Turner. She was waiting for me as I settled into the chair.
I checked the Glock and tucked the weapon back into the holster. I closed my eyes and leaned back.
I couldn’t sleep. But the shooter didn’t need to know that.
So I rested my eyes and pretended like I had enough of a soul left to dream.
*
The mind is a curious weapon.
Dead or alive, I was still human, with all the psychological characteristics; I could not dream, but the desire remained. At ease, and without amusement, my consciousness filled the emptiness. We may be social creatures, but the proof of our lone-wolf nature is our persistence of imagination. My closed eyelids provided a blank canvas, against which images filed past as though thrown against a projection screen, a silent movie with snippets of my old life, and a new, nightmare one interchanged.
I thought of Clay, of Jessica. But these thoughts were old, worn out hats. The pain of them was familiar, safe; a pity party where I was the honored guest. Instead, I turned away from them and the shimmering picture frame of Lana Turner. She became Niko in black and white. My thoughts were as developed as an adolescent’s. Her lithe figure danced before me, beckoning, inviting, and I wondered if she really liked me or if she flirted with every corpse that came under her care. Hmmmm, Niko. What I would do to her if I were alive.
Maybe you should be thinking about your son, I remonstrated myself.
Except he was dead. Supposed to be dead. But now, I had Twit 1 and Twit 2 showing up at my door, insisting he was somewhere out there and that only I could find him. Lafferty had referred them in the first place; maybe I should have gone straight to him for the rest of the story.
And then, there was the creepy tarot card to consider.
“Fuck it,” I muttered, and shifted like a man dreaming.
*
Nothing happened.
I had not been sure what to expect; but with the Rogers in lockdown, I need only wait to draw in my adversary. I checked on them as though they were errant children, opening my old bedroom door. Huddled shapes in the early morning light, they slept innocently, drawing long, deep, untroubled breaths. I envied them their shared humanity, their capacity to dream.
