The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  The forest began to change, too, as if instead of sheltering those who had been its friends it now fed upon their fear. The trees of the grove became wracked and twisted, and a blight spread from the grove to the forest at large. Some said this was due to people no longer going willingly into the forest, others that the blight had not started in the grove but was instead due to the houses and the roads we had built: a slurry of chemicals and pollutants had leeched into the ground and sickened the trees. Something, in any case, was wrong with the forest. There were those who felt we should no longer bring people to the woods at the end of their lives. But what else were we to do with these nearly dead? The tradition was strong enough to continue.

  And so it kept on for months, then for years, until we came to believe this was the way things were meant to be, that we were meant to meet the end of life in darkness and terror. We stayed shy of the forest except to bring the moribund to the grove. Even the delegation, elected by us, now shivered to enter the forest and hurried quickly away. Many of these, having observed over and over again those they had taken into the forest screaming and afraid, chose to kill themselves when their own time came, preferring self-murder to whatever fate might await them within the grove.

  The city folded in on itself, becoming a shadow of its former self, as twisted and broken as the forest. Many moved to other places. But some stayed, waiting, living in broken-down houses in a moribund city beside a moribund forest as they themselves grew moribund, because they had nowhere else to go.

  I was among those who stayed. By the time the forest and the city began to change, I was too set in my ways to flee, and I knew I was dying. A decade before, I had served as a member of the delegation. I had seen the fright of the moribund, had even tied certain of them to trees. I knew what awaited me in the forest: fear. And yet I stayed.

  Time passed. I lived what was left of my life and attempted to forget what I had seen, what I had done. I was often successful. I loved my children and grandchildren. As I grew increasingly frail, I realized I did not want to lose the time I could have with them, even if it meant ending my life tied to a tree in the grove.

  Soon I went from frail to fragile and then fell and broke several of my bones. The doctors set these bones, but when they did not heal properly, it was decided I would be sent to hospice. And so I went. My son and daughter would not look at me when they said good-bye. My grandchildren would, but only because they had no clear idea where I was going or what would happen to me there. I embraced my loved ones and entered limbo.

  II.

  Each day as I awoke in hospice I wondered: Will this be the day they call my name? A day went by, then two, then a week, then a month. My bones still did not heal properly, but they got no worse. Soon, I learned to walk with a crutch. Others were called, even those who had come to hospice after me, but never me. Perhaps I won’t be called, I began thinking after a time. Perhaps I will prove myself sufficiently able that I will be allowed to return to my life.

  And then: Elo Havel, they called through the hospice’s open doorway. Elo Havel!

  “Yes?” I said, hobbling forward. “That is my name. What do you want?”

  You have been chosen to commune with nature, said the delegation, for of course it was they.

  Other names were called after mine, but I cannot be expected to remember them. My head was swimming. I experienced difficulty thinking. Before I knew it, I was being carried into the forest, each arm wrapped around the neck of a delegate as they transported me to meet my fate—just as I, in my time as a delegate, had carried others. There were, I realized, once I had gathered myself again, three of the moribund besides me, each apprehensive but none as of yet panicked.

  We could smell the blood long before we arrived. It had been bad when I had seen it a decade before, back when I was a delegate, but it had grown much, much worse. As we entered the grove, countless flies arose buzzing from the ground. There were maggots, too, wriggling on the damper portions of the earth that were, I couldn’t help but notice, always to be found at the base of a tree. The trees of the grove were dead and dry, mere collections of sticks now, bleached by sun, ghosts of the trees they had once been.

  First one of our number began screaming, and then another, then the third. The second tried, to the best of his ability considering the severity of his ailments, to flee. I, who had at least some idea what to expect, was the only one of the four capable (if only just) of maintaining my composure.

  The delegates, too, I realized, were nearly as upset. They were eager to tie me and my companions so they could leave, and this made them inadvertently cruel. I did not judge them. I saw my past self in them—I had been slightly less panicked perhaps since the state of the grove had not been nearly so horrific, but I had still been gruff and blunt and eager to be gone.

  I took it as best I could, with what equanimity I could muster. I let them tie me to a dead tree, even did my best to aid them. I was struck in the face for my pains. I did my best to receive that blow with equanimity as well.

  In the end, they left, and left us alone. I could hear the others shouting and weeping around me. I did my best to block this out. I did not want to meet my death that way. Here I am, I thought, there is nothing I can do about it. I will soon be dead. There is no point in being afraid.

  I waited for whatever would come. I tried, best I could, considering the circumstances, to clear my mind, clear my thoughts, blot out the groans and cries around me. I thought of my life, my son and daughter, my grandchildren, what it was like to see them and be with them. I kept thinking of this, somehow, despite the wails that once again rose up around me. I kept my eyes closed and tried to imagine myself elsewhere, back in the life I had left.

  One by one the screams of the others were abruptly cut off. Something was moving among us, something vast, snorting. I kept my eyes clenched shut, still trying best I could to imagine myself elsewhere. The faces of my family continued to hover before my eyes, but as the sounds came closer, these faces grew distorted and monstrous.

  And then I sensed the creature before me, its breath hot on my face. I hesitated a moment, then opened my eyes.

  What did I see? Surely that is the only reason you have bothered to write me. Surely this is what you want to know. What sort of creature was it?

  I am afraid I am in little position to enlighten you, having only the evidence of my eyes to guide me. It seemed to me a creature made of broken branches and loam and hunks of tar, twisted metal, shards of glass. An odd amalgam of dead forest and city refuse, it moved in an extraordinary, rolling fashion, at once so hideous and so marvelous that I found myself unable to cry out or even breathe. The others who had been lashed to the trees around me were already gone, tatters of bloody rope the only indication they had once been in the grove. And indeed, the muzzle of the thing, to the degree to which it could be said to have a muzzle, was slick with blood. I did not quite believe I was seeing what I was seeing. I believed instead that my mind had substituted what it could bear to see for whatever was actually there. I closed my eyes again, and waited for it to kill me.

  III.

  And yet for some reason it did not kill me. Instead, when I finally opened my eyes again it was to find myself alone, dawn just breaking. I struggled free of the ropes and then stood. Unaccountably, I felt better than I had in months. I could walk again, even without the aid of a crutch. The forest, I have come in time to believe, had chosen not to destroy me but rather to heal me.

  For a long time I hesitated over what to do. I could not, I knew, remain within that desolate grove. But should I go back to the city or should I continue deeper into the forest, find perhaps a place still verdant and alive? Was I part of the forest now? I honestly was unsure. But in the end, the draw of city and family was too strong. And so I returned.

  Almost immediately I came to understand I had made the wrong choice.

  I have told you already what I found when I returned to the city. Everything was as I had left it, but it
no longer acknowledged me. It was as if I no longer existed. I was no ghost—I could physically grasp those around me, but they did not seem aware of my touch: they would stop their motion or conversation until I released them, but that was all. Even my grandchildren stared through me. Something had happened to me when I was in the forest. I had, in some measure, been transformed.

  Yet it gave me some pleasure to watch them, even if I could not be seen. Thus, I found myself back in the house I had once occupied, before my forced removal to hospice: an observer of the lives that had once been close to mine, alive for myself but not for anyone around me, a ghost of sorts, but a curious one.

  It is here that your letter has found me. It gives me hope, your letter, that I still exist for someone, that one of the delegates found one undamaged set of ropes and believes someone survived. Even hope that there are others like me, that Elo Havel is not alone.

  That is all I can offer you concerning the forest and concerning myself. What can you tell me in return? Who are you, and what? Has your experience some connection to my own? Can we perhaps meet face-to-face? If we do, will you be aware of me? Can you help me?

  I eagerly await your reply. But I shall not wait forever. I shall not even wait long. I understand better with each passing day that this is no longer the place for me, that I do not belong. The forest beckons. I belong to it now. Do not hesitate too long to reply or you shall find me gone.

  His Haunting

  1.

  Three times in his life someone or something unknown had opened Arn’s door as he tried to sleep, silently sliding it ajar and then standing immobile in the gap. That was all, just standing there, unmoving, just barely visible in the darkness. It wasn’t even all that threatening, he told his therapist, not really. What had disturbed him most about it was not knowing who or what it was. In the darkness, he could make nothing out beyond the door’s frame and the silhouette of the figure enclosed within. A large figure, male almost certainly, hulking, head nearly scraping the lintel.

  “Who is it?” he had asked that first time, sitting up in bed. How long the figure was there, he wasn’t sure—it felt at once like a very long time and no time at all. The figure didn’t answer—nothing about it made Arn believe it had heard him. But as soon as he threw his blanket off, the door began to creak shut, the latch sinking into the slot just as he reached it. By the time he fumbled the door open and peered out, the hall outside was deserted.

  …

  That first time, he hurried through the small house, searching for it. He turned on the lights and looked into the other rooms, peered into closets and cabinets. No one was there. He felt he should be frightened—and part of him was, but another part was surprisingly calm and unafraid, as if already dead.

  Hoping not to have to wake her, he saved his aunt’s bedroom for last. But finally, having looked without success everywhere else, he knocked softly on her door. When she didn’t answer, he opened it.

  It was very dark inside. He could not see her, could only hear thickened breathing.

  “Aunt,” he whispered.

  There was no answer.

  “Aunt, is it just you in there?” he whispered.

  The breathing sputtered, ceased. He heard something move in the bed. He thought he could vaguely make out motion in the darkness, though perhaps this was his imagination.

  And for an instant he felt torn in two, as if he were both the person just waking up in bed watching and the figure framed in the doorway—for hadn’t he just been the one and now was the other? Only when his aunt shrieked did he begin to feel like just one person again.

  He needed help to sort through them, these three brief moments that were dark little holes drilled across the length of his life. He would come once a week to this office with its aggressively modern furniture and sit in a chair across from the therapist he had quickly come to think of as his therapist and spend forty minutes circling around what his husband liked to call jokingly “your haunting.” Arn had trained himself to smile whenever his husband said that, as if it was funny. But it wasn’t funny, not really.

  And please, he warned his therapist, don’t think this is about my resentment of my husband. I have no more resentment than most spouses. I love my husband. I understand he’s trying to make me feel better. But it is my haunting—that’s what he doesn’t understand.

  …

  “I saw something,” is what he’d explained, once he’d gotten his aunt calmed down and they were sitting together in the kitchen, lights blazing.

  “I saw something too,” said his aunt. “It was standing in my doorway looking in at me as I tried to sleep. Turned out to be you, Jack. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I’m not Jack,” he responded. Jack had been his father’s name. It wasn’t even close to his own name. He hardly even looked like his father.

  Don’t write that down, he said to his therapist, and then, What are you writing down?

  Does my writing make you nervous? asked his therapist.

  But no, this was not what he was asking for—he was not asking for the experience to be analyzed, not yet. This was precisely why he hadn’t managed to talk about the haunting, his haunting, before now—even though he increasingly recognized that it was what had driven him to therapy in the first place. No, he just wanted his therapist to put the notebook down and listen to what had happened, to take the words in before deciding what they meant.

  There at the kitchen table, his aunt held her head in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said. And then, “Don’t worry, I know who you are.” It was not until she said this that Arn considered the possibility that at least for a moment she might not have. That it wasn’t that she’d misspoke, but that she’d glimpsed someone or something else in his face.

  And then she recovered. “What were you thinking, Arn?” she asked. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was looking for it.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  Once he explained, her hands started to shake. Even knowing he’d already searched the house, she insisted they each arm themselves with a knife and search again. They found nothing, nothing and nobody was there. They went outside with flashlights and shined them along the ground near the flower beds, but there was nothing there either, no footprints, no signs of disturbance. They played their flashbeams up at the roof and saw nothing but roof. They opened the storm cellar and descended, but there was nothing down below, just the faint, sour smell of rot.

  And yet, from that day forward his aunt treated him differently, with caution, as if she wasn’t sure she recognized him.

  Time passed, said Arn.

  And so you forgot about it, said his therapist.

  No, said Arn, I never forgot. Every time I fell asleep I expected to open my eyes and see that door open again, and in its dark opening a darker silhouette standing.

  But it didn’t happen again. Not in that house, anyway. Not around his aunt. That was the odd thing, he told his therapist: he’d always thought of hauntings as being bound to a place—a house, a pool in which somebody drowned, the site of a fatal car wreck, that sort of nonsense. He’d wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what it was about his aunt’s house that had led to him seeing the silhouette at the threshold of his room. Indian burial ground? Decades-old murder? Previous residence of someone who died alone and neglected? But there was nothing.

  So, said his therapist once he fell silent, you were already thinking of it as a ghost.

  Oh yes, Arn said, as a haunting. But not yet as my haunting.

  “You must have dreamed it,” his aunt said as he kept talking, kept quizzing her about the house. “It’s just an ordinary house, built just a year or two before you were born. Before that, this was an orange grove.”

  “But there must—” he started.

  “Sometimes dreams can be so vivid they seem real,” his aunt said firmly. “You dreamed it.”

  …

  Your aunt raised
you, ventured his therapist. But I’m afraid I’m confused about what happened to your parents.

  So am I, said Arn.

  His therapist tented his fingers, gazing at Arn over them, eyes steady. He waited.

  I never knew my mother, Arn finally said. She died when I was born. My father … vanished.

  Vanished?

  Arn nodded. One day my father woke up, and he no longer looked like himself.

  What did he look like if not himself?

  I don’t know. I remember sitting at the breakfast table with him, looking for something in his face, unsure what. All I knew was it wasn’t there. And then I realized he was looking at me too, staring. He was trying to pretend he was reading his paper, but he was staring over it at me. Whatever he was looking for he was finding, and it frightened him.

  I left for school, Arn continued. When I came back that afternoon, he was gone. I never saw him again.

  What do you think happened to him?

  I don’t want to talk about it, said Arn. Not today.

  This is a safe place, his therapist began, but Arn rapidly cut him off.

  You believe my haunting will tell you something about my relationship with my missing father, he said, that that’s the point of me telling it to you. Maybe so. You can tell me that next time if you’d like. But for now, let my haunting be my haunting.

  But Arn seemed to have lost the thread. For a moment the two of them just sat there, faces blank, expressionless. Then his therapist cleared his throat and spoke.

  She thought you were dreaming, he said. Your aunt, I mean.

  Yes, so she said.

  Have you considered she may have been right?

  Yes.