The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  And yet his father looked like he always had—face hale and hearty, figure large and looming, unbent by age. It was as if his father had not aged at all. Which, in a manner of speaking, he hadn’t, since he’d been dead now for thirty years.

  Hello Jens, his dead father said.

  “Hello,” said Jens, because he did not know what else to say. He was not, he was surprised to find, frightened. More than anything he was curious: Why now? And curious too to see if his father turned around, would the back of his bald skull be solid and smooth or, as he had last seen it, broken and soft?

  “What do you want?” Jens asked.

  His father did not answer. He just smiled in a way that didn’t move the muscles of his face. It was as if a smile had suddenly been painted on.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you,” said Jens.

  The painted smile flicked to a painted frown. Not that long, said his father. Only yesterday.

  It had not been just yesterday. It had been three decades before. Should he correct his father? He wasn’t sure. What was the etiquette in such a situation, when you were made to interact with the dead?

  “Why are you here?” asked Jens.

  Don’t I have a right? his father asked indignantly. Isn’t it my house? His lips when he spoke, Jens realized, didn’t seem to move.

  No, it wasn’t his house. It wasn’t a house the man had ever been in but a place Jens had purchased shortly after his father’s death, with the money the insurance paid out.

  “How exactly can I help you?”

  Help me? said his father. He gave that same painted-on smile. Isn’t it clear I’m beyond help?

  And then he held out his hand, beckoned.

  2.

  He came to himself downstairs, beside the front door, his hand attempting to turn the knob as his wife shook him. When she realized he was awake, she stopped.

  “What was it?” she asked. “Some sort of dream? Why were you going outside?”

  “Did I want to go out?” he asked. “I was having a nightmare,” he said, though he wasn’t sure that was exactly what it had been. “How did I get down here?”

  “You were sleepwalking,” she said. “Muttering too. Saying something.”

  “What was I saying?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t understand.”

  “Good,” he said. Inside, he winced. It did not seem the right thing to say.

  “Come back to bed,” she said, and he let himself be led. On the stairs, she asked, “What was your nightmare about?”

  He waved his hands in dismissal. “Hard to remember,” he said.

  He lay there in the bed, beside her. In no time at all her breathing deepened and her body relaxed, and he was sure she was asleep.

  Did he want to go to sleep? Not really. It didn’t seem like a particularly good idea. It was not that he was afraid of his father, of his father’s ghost, but he did not particularly want to spend more time with it either. He had not missed his father since he had killed him thirty years ago, had hardly even thought about him. Which made him wonder again, Why now?

  He slid out of the bed, careful not to wake his wife. He felt his way to the door in the dark and out onto the landing.

  A shaft of moonlight struck down through the skylight. He couldn’t see well, but he could see enough to know where he was going. He made his way down the stairs and to the entryway below.

  There was the door, the handle he had been touching when his wife stopped him. Where had he been going, and why?

  Hello, Jens, he heard his father say behind him.

  He flinched, then froze. Gathering himself, he turned around. There the man was, just visible, half in and half out of the dark, his lit eye glittering coldly. Jens wasn’t asleep now, he was almost sure. Hallucinating, maybe? Or was he really here? Had he been asleep before?

  “Hello,” he managed.

  You don’t look good, son, said his father. You haven’t been taking care of yourself.

  But he had been taking care of himself. It was just that he was three decades older.

  “What do you want?” Jens asked.

  Do you remember where you killed me? asked his father.

  “I didn’t …,” Jens started, by reflex, and then fell silent.

  So his father knew he was dead. And that Jens had killed him. Did that change anything?

  “I was … cleared of any involvement in your murder,” Jens offered.

  Of course you were, said his father. You’re clever. You have good genes. I would expect no less of you.

  “I …,” Jens trailed off. “Yes,” he finally said. “Of course I remember.”

  Will you do something for me?

  “I don’t know.”

  His father ignored him as if he hadn’t spoken. He stared at Jens. He had been staring the whole time, never blinking, his one lit eye never moving from Jens’s face.

  Go back there.

  “Why?”

  It is important, said his father. Go back there.

  “But your body isn’t even there. You’re buried in the graveyard off Twenty-Sixth. I can show you your headstone.”

  I’m not talking about my body. I’m talking about the place you killed me. Go there. Now.

  3.

  It was crazy, he told himself even as he pulled on his boots. There was no point going, no point taking instruction from his father’s ghost. That was one of the reasons he had killed his father—he was tired of taking instruction from him. Well, that and the insurance money.

  What does my wife know? he wondered. She knew he had been interviewed by the police—she had been there when they had arrived. She knew he had been cleared, partly due to her testimony. She had been asleep when he had killed his father—he had made sure of that, a pill crushed and mixed into her wine. His wife knew he had gone to bed with her and that he had been there when, in the morning, she woke up. Why would she not think he was there beside her the whole night?

  No, it was foolish. He had lived nearly thirty years believing his wife had no idea he had killed his father. There was no reason to reconsider that now.

  Besides, his father was waiting, in the dark near the door, watching him. No matter where Jens moved, his father was always looking at him.

  “Shall we go?” asked Jens.

  After you, said his father.

  “No, after you,” Jens answered.

  They had had the same exchange the night his father died, Jens realized once the door was locked and he was cutting through the grassy field and moving toward the forested mountain beyond. After you. No, after you. His father had shrugged and gone first, and Jens had followed close behind him. He had watched the back of his father’s bald head as the man climbed the switchbacked path up the mountainside to the cave.

  “A man?” his father had said.

  “Yes,” Jens had said. “A man. I think he’s dead.”

  “Did you check his breathing? His pulse?”

  “I couldn’t find anything.”

  His father grunted, kept walking.

  “The thing I don’t understand,” his father said a moment later, “is what you were doing up there yourself.”

  Yes, he had to admit to himself, there had been a flaw to his plan, and his father had found it. There was no sane reason he would be up in the cave in the middle of the night. “I go there sometimes,” he had claimed. “To think.”

  “To think,” his father said flatly, not even bothering to turn around. “This is a strange place,” he said. “I’d think twice before coming up here to think.”

  True, his father had often told stories of the cave and the woods around it, as a way of making it difficult for Jens, when he was young, to sleep. Which was one reason it had given Jens a certain amount of satisfaction to kill him there. His father had been a good storyteller, he had to give him that, even if he was a sadist. Though now he wondered if killing him here was what had allowed his father to come back as a ghost. If so, he
had taken his time about it.

  Back then, he had seen nothing but the back of his father’s head, bald and featureless. Now, however, the dead father in front of him showed only his face. He wasn’t walking backward exactly—it was more as if, motionless, he was always exactly the same distance ahead and looking back, always keeping an eye on Jens.

  “Aren’t you interested in knowing why I did it?” asked Jens.

  Did what?

  “Killed you.”

  The face flicked into a frown. No, his father said. At this point knowing would make no difference.

  “Sometimes you think you know the world,” one of those stories had begun, “and that’s your first mistake.” Now, hiking up to the cave, it was hard not to think of these stories of his father’s:

  A man goes into the woods and lies down. When he wakes up again, years have passed for him, but only minutes for the rest of the world.

  Or, another: a man enters a cave. He twists and turns through its passages and comes out again. For him, no time has passed, but in the world at large, thirty years have gone by. And when he hikes back down the mountain and back to the town he has always lived in, he discovers another man who looks just like him is living with his wife, that someone else has been imitating him.

  Perhaps that was why his father had come back. Because it had been thirty years.

  How had that last story continued? Jens had not thought about it all this time. All he remembered was the original man trying to convince his wife that she had lived with an imposter for the last three decades, and failing. Obviously if one of them was an imposter, she reasoned, it would be the much younger man. It would be him.

  “But he would not listen,” his father had said—he remembered now. “He kept insisting until the townsfolk had little choice but to slaughter him.”

  Thirty years earlier, they had reached the cave at last, Jens breathing heavily from the climb and perhaps, too, from anxiety.

  His father was barely winded. He played his flashlight over the walls. “Where is he?” he had asked. “This man you claimed you saw?”

  “He was right there,” said Jens. “In that.”

  On the floor a line of pale sand traced a circle, with a slightly smaller circle made of dirt just within it.

  “What the hell is that?” his father asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jens claimed. He moved forward and reached to touch the twinned circles with his toe, but his father stopped him.

  “Don’t,” said his father. “You don’t know what’s inside it.”

  But Jens did know. He knew nothing was inside it since he had drawn the circle himself. Unlike his father, he was not superstitious.

  His father crouched to get a closer look, still careful not to touch or cross the circle. And that was the moment Jens chose to strike the back of his head with the rock he had prepared just for that purpose. His father groaned. He fell into the circles, breaking the lines. A few more blows to the back of his skull and he was dead.

  Here we are, said his father. Again.

  “Yes,” said Jens. “Here we are.” He played the flashlight around the cave. It was empty, nothing there at all. If he looked carefully, he thought he could see the traces of the circle he had made, but little beyond that.

  But of course there couldn’t be traces of the circles: it had been thirty years. And yet, it seemed to him that that was what he was seeing.

  His father’s body had been found quickly, almost impossibly so. He’d expected a month or two of his father being missing and he having to pretend that, like everyone else, he didn’t know where he had gone. But shortly after his wife awoke, the police had arrived at his door looking for him.

  “What is it?” he had said.

  “We have a few questions we’d like to ask,” said one. “Can we come in?”

  “Is anything wrong?” he had asked.

  “When was the last time you saw your father?”

  For a moment he thought his father must have survived, that he wasn’t dead after all, that bloody and broken he had stumbled his way down the mountain and called the police.

  “Two days ago,” he managed. “Maybe three?”

  “Three days,” his wife said from beside him. “He came over here yelling like a lunatic.”

  Their attention sharpened. “What was he upset about?” they asked her.

  “Is anything wrong?” he asked again before his wife could answer. His panic from worrying that his father was still alive was exactly right for allowing him to convey anxiety and shock when they finally told him his father’s body had been found. He tried to hold on to that panic, to not let relief wash over him until they were finally done with him.

  He walked around the remnants of the twinned circles without crossing into them.

  Remember how quickly I was found? his father asked, as if he knew what Jens was thinking. Perhaps he did.

  “Yes,” said Jens.

  Who drew the circles? he asked. Was it you?

  Jens hesitated, then nodded.

  Why? Did you know what they would do?

  He had suspected the circles would interest his father and cause him to let down his guard. He had, too, thought it might set the police off on the wrong track, thinking it an occult murder, a ceremony gone wrong, rather than bringing them after him. But neither, he felt, were what his father had in mind.

  “What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

  His father didn’t answer, just stayed watching him as, restless, he kept circling with that same unblinking expression.

  You’re afraid of it, his father taunted. You made it and yet you’re afraid of it.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Jens said.

  All right then, said his father. Prove it.

  He could see the circle clearly now, shimmering in the dim light, the lighter line and then, within it, the darker line. Perhaps it was not a circle but only the ghost of a circle. In either case, it could not hurt him. He was not superstitious. He had made it: something he had made could not hurt him.

  He stepped across the lines and into the center.

  And then, abruptly, his father was very close indeed.

  The mistake you made, his father’s voice said softly, was assuming I was your father, rather than just someone or something resembling him. And when Jens turned to flee, there was his father, or the thing that resembled his father, both in front of him and behind.

  4.

  When she woke up, she saw her husband was still asleep. He lay on his left side, crumpled up, which seemed strange to her—he never slept on that side because, when he was younger, his father broke that arm in one of his rages. His father had been a real bastard, a brutal man. Her husband never spoke of him. Just as well he was gone.

  She shook her husband a little and he groaned. He rolled to his back, winced, then opened his eyes. They wandered a little, then came to focus on her.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Feeling all right?” she asked. “Over the nightmare?”

  “Nightmare?” he asked, and he seemed to search his memory without finding anything. “What did I say it was about?”

  “You didn’t say,” she said.

  “I’m fine now,” he claimed. “Better than I’ve been in a long time.”

  There was something about him, something different, something she couldn’t put her finger on. Or maybe it was just that she was sleepy too from being awakened in the middle of the night.

  She sighed. “What shall we do today?” she asked.

  “You don’t have to go to work?”

  She furrowed her brow. “Silly you,” she said. “I haven’t worked for years.”

  “I’m off today?”

  “It’s Saturday. What’s wrong with you?”

  There was an expression on his face she couldn’t read. “I don’t know what I’m thinking,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything in reply, just lay on her side with her hand propping up
her head, watching him. There was something, she felt, that she was trying to see, but she couldn’t see it.

  After a while he looked away, stared at the ceiling.

  “What to do …,” he mused. “A walk,” he said.

  A walk? she thought. That was a first.

  “Or a hike. Up to the mountains,” he said. “To a little place I used to go. A special place. You’ll love it.” He turned to face her. “You’ll love it so much,” he promised. “Once I take you there, you’ll have a hard time dragging yourself away.”

  Daylight Come

  At last, one night I went to the cave alone. They forbad me this—I could not go alone, nor at night—but I went anyway.

  It took a certain level of preparation. As my first keeper slept, I managed to scrape away at the dirt beneath my pallet, making sure to pack the loose dirt back into the hole before he awoke. Each day I dug a little deeper, and on the fourth day or perhaps fifth, I bloodied my fingers on dirt that did not move because it was a stone. The stone was large enough that it took another day, perhaps two, before I dug it out, only to have to place it back in its hole again almost immediately and hurriedly heap dirt over it: my first keeper had begun to awaken.

  I had no time to suck my fingers clean. I barely had enough time to throw myself on my pallet, the stone a lump in my back. I was feigning sleep when the man entered, yawning, scratching his belly.

  He was large, massive even. Unlike the others, he never seemed frightened of me. He noticed nothing, however, paid no attention to my dirty and raw fingers. He nudged me with the toe of his boot. When I did not respond, he tugged at the chain hooked to the metal cuff around my neck.

  “On your feet, eater of darkness,” the first keeper said. “Daylight come.”

  Groaning, I sat up. My hair was so tangled I could not pass my fingers through it. I had not seen my reflection for days, weeks even. I was fairly certain if I did, I would not recognize myself.

  “Someday,” I informed my first keeper, “I will kill you.”

  He laughed, shook his head. “Look at you,” he said. “Whether eater or mere ordinary woman, you are no threat to me.”