Bathwater Blues: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “This must be for Nuala,” Bud said. “He couldn’t know…”

  “He might.”

  “We should just leave.”

  Addie sighed. “There isn’t anywhere to go, Bud. Trust me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We tried. That road goes on forever. It’s just trees out there.”

  And something else in the trees, she thought.

  Bud winced and held his side. He leaned against the desk, found his way onto the chair beside it. “I’ve survived too much to let him kill me now…” His head drooped tiredly, staring into the cracks of the floorboards under his feet. “I can’t go much longer, Addie. I can feel that I can’t.”

  “All the more reason not to waste time.”

  After a moment of rest, Bud got to his feet and Addie walked very closely beside him, back through the house downstairs to the front door. They stepped outside. The night was dark and quiet as ever. The sun had to be coming up any time now, Addie thought, or getting close.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  Bud nodded. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  With his knife and her rod in hand, they descended the porch steps and skirted the edge of the house to the back. There they peered across the field toward the pond. Under the sinking moon standing in the long grass was a tall, burly silhouette.

  “Any ideas?” Addie asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought you might do the talking…”

  They entered the field, Bud’s knife hidden behind his back, Addie’s metal rod hidden below the top of the grass. It was like approaching a parent with bad news, Addie thought, unsure of what their reaction might be, or the consequences of the admitted crime.

  He put Nuala up to it, remember, she thought. He wanted you dead.

  The doctor never took notice of them the nearer they came, or at least never acknowledged their approach. Facing away, his arms hung at his sides, the bag on his head slack and lumpy.

  “We’re here, Dr. Lull,” Addie said, heart aflutter. She gripped the metal rod in both her hands.

  It was then he turned to them, a half circle spin, and his earthy odor met them on the breeze of his loose coat.

  “Nuala’s dead,” Bud blurted out. “I… I had to. She would’ve killed us.”

  “You wanted her to kill us,” Addie said. “You told her we were hopeless.”

  The doctor, to neither of their surprise, said nothing.

  “Anyway, we’re here now,” Addie continued. “We want to go home.”

  They faced each other for an agonizingly long moment. Addie’s head filled with more warnings, and she could see in the corner of her eye how Bud shifted restlessly, turned the knife behind his back over and over.

  “You have to show—” Bud began to say, but was interrupted as the doctor turned to face the pond once more.

  They exchanged puzzled glances with one another, minds swimming.

  He’s given up on us. He won’t kill us or help us. We’re stranded here forever.

  Dr. Lull fell to his knees at the water’s edge. Both of them startled at the heaviness of it, like a giant sack of flour dropped to the dirt.

  “I don’t think he wants to hurt us,” Addie said.

  She moved toward the doctor, feet slow and steady. She lifted her bound hands as she neared him, fingers open, and after hovering near him a while, she touched them to the rough cloth over his head. At her touch the doctor bowed his head toward the water. She paused, chest hammering.

  “Addie…” Bud said behind her, but she didn’t listen.

  She took the cloth in her fingers and pulled. It snagged beneath the collar of the doctor’s coat, so she gave a gentle tug and it came up, and she pulled it farther. The opening widened as it slipped over the curves of his head, and in a matter of seconds the sack was dangling empty in her hand. She dropped it in the damp dirt. Bud uttered a low sound behind her, one of astonishment. Addie wasn’t sure what she expected, but neither of them could ever have said it was this.

  A crystal globe sat on the doctor’s shoulders, clear and smooth and deep. Amongst the silver laces of moonlight captured along its edges, Addie glimpsed her awestruck expression warped over its surface.

  “What is it?” Bud asked.

  “It’s glass,” she said. She thought of touching it but abstained. There was a reason he kept it covered. “What are you?”

  The crystal shifted. The moonlight travelling through it pulled together, like winding thread, and then it curled and shifted with the glass. It churned around, melted and looped into ribbon and melted again, and then an image formed inside.

  By then Bud was standing with Addie, shoulder to shoulder. They watched the image forming in the glass together, both with their own ideas as it neared anything recognizable, but when it seemed to be finished neither of them saw anything. It was dark and yellow, and tiny black flecks buzzed around like fleas. Addie didn’t understand it.

  “What do you want from us?” Bud asked.

  The glass shifted again. This time, the ribbons pulled together, knotted in the dark center of the glass, and from the knot the shape of a hand emerged and pressed itself to the globe’s interior surface.

  “You do it,” Bud said.

  Addie felt no hesitation. She touched the glass, first with just her fingertips, and then with her entire palm. At that, the inside bloomed a pinkish-orange. The colors shifted through one another, like crossing rays of light. It remained that way for nearly a minute before she decided to remove her hand, and when she did another image formed. She recognized it at once.

  “That’s my mother,” she said. She said it less to Bud and more just to say it, to hear the words because her thoughts couldn’t make much sense of anything on their own.

  Her mother’s face hovered in the glass, and Addie was reminded of the crystal ball in The Wizard of Oz. Soon her face pulled back, so that her naked upper torso could be seen, and Addie watched as her mother drew a razor along her arm and blood rained down. Repulsed, she wanted to ask the doctor why he would show her such a thing at a time like this, but she said nothing.

  The image changed again. This time, it was of a young woman from behind (at least Addie assumed it was a woman). She was sitting on a bed, hair hanging down her back. She lifted one hand into view, holding a bottle of something. Then she lifted the other, a smaller bottle in it, orange with a white cap. Addie gathered what she was seeing and pulled her eyes away. She looked to Bud instead, who watched with hard scrutiny, eyes narrowed to slits. She wondered if he saw it, too. When she looked back the image was gone. The ribbon of light was knotting itself again, and once more a hand reached out and touched the glass.

  “That’s for you,” Addie said.

  Appearing irritated, Bud nonetheless put his palm against the doctor’s head the same as Addie had done. She watched as the images swam together and took shape.

  There was a white door with a porch light on beside it. The door opened and a young man ran out. It was Bud. He hurried down the steps out of sight, and following into the doorway came a handful of people. Another young man was first, and then an older woman beside him. They stopped there, peering out. Farther in the house, down the hall, an older man stepped into view, watched the others from a distance as they watched Bud go wherever he’d gone. These people were his family, Addie deduced. She thought she might even know the events unfolding, the night he’d told her about—his ‘intervention’.

  The scene shifted again. Bud sat on a bed in a dark room, streetlight coming through the blinds at his back. He stared at something in his lap, which Addie correctly predicted what it would be. He lifted the gun, glinting in the faint amber light, and pointed the barrel toward his open mouth.

  Without thought, Addie took Bud’s hand in hers. He squeezed.

  The image faded and the ribbons of light returned to their usual places. The globe took on the dark of night around them. The doctor slumped forward some. He placed
his hands on the dirt, those human hands with their firm and determined intentions. Addie wondered what the point of it was, why he showed them what he did, but part of her knew. She sensed what was coming, though she couldn’t quite grasp the whole of it yet.

  His hands brushed through the dirt toward the water, sliding out on all fours, and Addie and Bud followed their journey with bated breath until his fingertips met the water. Then the globe started to change once more.

  “Addie,” Bud whispered.

  He pointed discreetly across the pond, off to their right. The bathtub waited there, creeping out of the grass on the pond’s shore. It was motionless as always, as bathtubs should be, but it hadn’t been there all along. It was watching them, she thought.

  She brought her attention back to the doctor, whose head was a colorful soup of stirring mist and light, purple and black and green and blue and gold. The colors joined and faded, and in their place new images began to show. These scenes came in quick succession, one after the other, all different but all so similar, and Addie had to strain to see most of them.

  They were just people. They were faces and expressions, most of them plain, troubled, or upset. Cheeks streamed with tears, mouths gaped in wailing. They were the faces of young and old, but they all looked so alike in their anguish, a new one following the last like a spraying deck of cards. Then there were more than just faces, there were entire bodies—greater scenes. These people hugged themselves alone in the dark. They looked longingly up at a sky through glass tinted by traffic lights. Lips trembled, eyes lowered in disappointment. Then the scenes grew greater still, and Addie began to see things she recognized. These people slept in beds Addie had come to be familiar with. They ate meals together at a table Addie had sat at many times in the last several weeks. They wandered a grassy field and circled a quiet pond much like the one they were at now, with a porcelain demon on display before them. Groups upon groups of these people, all so different and all so similar, time and time again, they were in the doctor’s history. Somewhere inside his house were folders with their names on them. In his wardrobe, Addie knew, were vases with their ashes inside them.

  Suddenly their images were interrupted by a fiery glow, and flames leaped into view, filled the globe with their licking, and what Addie swore was steam, rose from the glass into the night. Bud stepped back, feeling the heat the same as she did. The doctor’s crystal skull sizzled and popped. When they thought he might shatter any moment, the flames settled. They dropped out of sight, darkness following them down like curtains.

  From behind those curtains yet another apparition approached—tall, thin, uncanny. Two glowing white orbs revealed themselves. They blinked into existence like headlights, giant and bright. A sheath of feathers flurried inside the globe and hid them from sight again, and when they unfolded there was only a young woman left in their place. She sat upon a cliff’s edge, a stormy night as her backdrop. She stared into the thunderheads, her face illuminated by their tails of striking gold, and she wept with the storm.

  There is nothing out there for you.

  Despite the doctor’s ability to mesmerize them with his tragic montage, Addie found herself checking across the pond where the bathtub waited, her mind never letting its threat get too far from thought. It was still there, watching and waiting. Had it come closer? Possibly. She didn’t think so, however.

  Back inside the doctor’s head, Nuala’s storm shifted and they saw her once more, on her back in the basement with blood pooled around her, eyes shut as though she dreamed.

  How could he know when he was out here when it happened?

  Then the image pulled apart into the dancing threads of color and light. They spun and looped and passed through each other into knots, until they stitched another scene for them to see.

  It was the doctor himself this time. He was seated in his small, barren room at his desk, calm as a ghost at the helm of his shiny black typewriter. The bag was gone, so that they saw his crystal skull through his crystal skull. His fingers rested on the keys. In a haze of motion, the image focused on the typewriter, on his hands, on the blank sheet awaiting the typewriter’s ink to stamp meaning to it. The fingers moved. They punched the keys. Letters slapped themselves to the blank page in less than the blink of an eye, and both Addie and Bud followed closely as its message was brought to life.

  It read:

  Do me the honor.

  “He wants us to put him out of his misery,” Addie said in a low murmur, low enough that Bud didn’t even entirely hear.

  “You’re a hypocrite,” Bud said. “You took it from us and now you want it for yourself.”

  “How do we leave this place?” Addie asked. She stepped forward, closer to the water but careful not to touch it with her feet, and knelt next to the doctor, as though she could make eye contact with his glass bowl of a head. Could he see at all? she wondered. Did he see things differently than them? “Show us how to go home and maybe we’ll do it for you.”

  Bud kept quiet, eyed the two of them tensely. The crystal skull showed them one last thing. The bands of light around its edge floated toward the center, swam like loose threads. Then, piece by piece they separated into smaller cuts of light, like tiny bars of silver, and those bars separated into smaller pieces, and those into smaller pieces, again and again so quickly until the dome of the skull was filled with tiny, brilliant stipples of light.

  Bud grumbled and turned away. Addie stared into the light, like bright glowing sand suspended in a fishbowl. She wasn’t sure what she saw. Having seen the light’s transition, it was harder to recognize what it’d become, what it clearly was, but after a moment of staring into it, her sight focusing and losing focus and focusing again, all in an instant it occurred to her.

  “Bud, they’re stars…”

  The stars began to shrink into something else, something round and glassy, and a hand came into view, reaching toward it. Addie stared wide-eyed. It was the doctor again. The hands took hold of the globe and lifted it up, right off his shoulders into the dark. She was already looking right at it, at the exit, and he was showing them how…

  Bud shoved beside her, pulled the metal rod from her hand as she staggered. He joined the doctor’s side and raised it over his head.

  “Bud! No!”

  “He’ll never help us! This is what he wants, let’s give it to him.”

  Addie screamed, reached for him, for the metal rod in his falling fist. Like a police baton, he rapped it over the doctor’s head and an ear-splitting crack followed, sharp and fine. As quickly as he’d done it, an unseen force escaped the broken glass and blew him back like a bomb. He sailed through the air, metal rod spinning out of his reach, and landed several feet away flat on his back in the grass.

  A slice of light shimmered from the opening he’d made in the doctor’s skull, jagged and harsh like sunshiny snow. Addie flinched as it cast over her, as the doctor slowly turned his wounded head toward them over his shoulder. For the first time, his movements were messy, out of balance. He put a hand to the earth as he steadied himself onto his feet, and he wobbled from side to side when he straightened. The light piercing through his open head brightened. The crack in the glass split wider. There was a sudden wind around them, accompanied by a rushing vacuum noise, deafening and encompassing. Addie held her blowing hair aside as she peered around them, looking for the source of the wind, and as she did she saw the bathtub was gone from the side of the pond. She turned in a circle, saw nothing in the grass. Bud lay still a few feet away—unconscious, she hoped, and nothing worse.

  She turned back to the doctor. He swayed, stumbled back until both his heavy boots were deep in the pond water.

  The doctor knows best.

  Out of the water it came, like a marvelous stage fixture. The porcelain crocodile. It rose toward the shore at the doctor’s back, met his legs gently at the knee. At its touch, the doctor let himself go. He fell back, hands held to his aching globe, and splashed into the tub. He was so large that
his feet hung out the sides, as well as his hands, but something happened, something inside the tub which Addie couldn’t fathom, and all at once the doctor was sucked inside. His arms and legs folded up and the water pulled them in. If the wind wasn’t so strong they might have heard a wet shlunk. He was gone.

  Then the ground began to shake.

  Addie tipped, landed on one knee. She picked herself back up. The tub lowered itself back into the water until it vanished. She looked for Bud.

  “Bud!” she called. She danced clumsily through the grass to where he lay. She put her hands out for balance as the earth tried to rattle her off her feet. The wind continued to howl. “Bud!”

  He was on his back, eyes shut. She bent over him, fell beside him, and took his face in her hands. She called for him once more. She slapped him.

  She stood and surveyed the field. The property waited in the distance, empty and dead.

  There was a loud boom, an explosion, and Addie whirled to face it. The pond was there, lit like a newborn flame, dull and red. It boiled. Another explosion came, a hollow ripping trailed behind it, and the pond’s water lurched skyward. The ground tore apart from its shore, spiderwebbed like broken glass, the blood-like glow seeping through.

  “Bud!” Addie shouted again. She bent over him and slapped him again, much harder than before, but he didn’t react. “Fuck you!”

  She grabbed him under the arms and started to drag. Her feet scooted madly, left, right, left, right, the grass biting at her ankles. The explosions kept coming, and the ripping continued to follow, and the angry seams opened farther and farther through the earth from the pond, lighting a strange red network through the field. Addie watched it grow in horror, shuffled backward with Bud’s dead weight in her arms toward the doctor’s home behind them.

  Please, Bud. Wake up. Wake up. She slipped and fell on her butt. Groaning, she stood again, wrapped her arms around him tighter. Why did you do it?

  Fifteen yards or so from the property. She gasped for breath. Sweat beaded and fell from her temples, her forehead. And despite the open air, the grass, the new poisonous odors from the raging pond, she thought she smelled blood, thick and coppery and old, and her eyes fell repeatedly to Bud in her arms. His sheets, covered in his blood, flashed in her mind’s eye. She squeezed him harder.