by Russell Moon
“All right, Marcus,” he says evenly. “Okay, okay, easy. We are all friends here.”
I would not care if we were friends, which we aren’t, because I am overwhelmed by the desire—the absolute need—to take Eartha out. And I would never calm down, could not if I wanted to, but for my mother.
“What?” Eleanor says. “What is it?” She gets to her feet quickly, unsteadily, though I swear I have not seen her take a sip of her drink.
The music is gone now; the candles are still flickering but no longer dancing. It’s all gone flat. The room begins to stink with the decay of shellfish. Working on reflex alone, because I’m half out of my mind, I gather what there is of myself and step toward her.
“It’s just Chuck, El,” I say, looking at Dr. Spence but stroking her arm. “I’m going to take care of him now.”
“Yes,” she says, “please do. We are awfully sorry about this.”
“No bother. Please sit, Eleanor. Eartha, my dear, would you mind clearing this out and bringing in the afters?”
“Not at all,” she says, coming out from behind her father as I head off toward Chuck. The scene I leave behind is as calm as if nothing had just happened.
As before, Chuck is sitting there staring up at me. But this time, all I do is stand there, staring back down at him, shaking.
I know it now. More now. I know it like I knew it when I killed the snake, like I knew it further when I tried to maul my own Chuck, and like I know it further still and undeniably now.
I’m thinking of every measly, magical thing I’ve done since I turned seventeen, and every big evil thing, coming closer and closer together, and it is all so crystal clear. I am not controlling this thing. I am controlling it, in fact, less and less and less. And it is accelerating. As the power grows ever larger, bigger, faster inside me, I grow ever more powerless to contain it—to contain me. The original me—the one I know, the one I can trust—somewhat—fades as the other rises. I could have killed Eartha there. So easily.
“Jesus. What are the possibilities?” I ask Chuck. I decide here and now that passively sussing things out is not an option. I can’t continue to hope the truth will present itself to me, because waiting for that could mean waiting until it is too late and losing myself completely.
“Marcus,” comes a voice from behind me. Eartha’s voice. I turn toward her. “Coming to dessert?” she asks.
“That was quick,” I say, my voice cracking just slightly.
She frowns curiously. “I don’t think so, really.”
I check my watch again. Another two hours gone away.
Chuck quietly growls and whimpers behind me. He sounds like a motorbike stuck in mud.
“I need to use the bathroom,” I say.
“Of course,” she says. “Top of the stairs, second door on the right. Don’t be long.”
I mount the quiet, carpeted stairs as she returns to the dining room. I can hear the crystal music again.
I am in the bathroom. I don’t need to go to the bathroom. I am so tense it is unlikely I could go even if I wanted to.
But that isn’t what I came for. I came because I had to, because I had to see. What is up here, what they’re up to. Who they are. Am I expecting to find potions, cauldrons, chicken’s feet, eyes of newt, and wolfsbane? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to find or even what to look for. But rather than waiting and seeing, I’m looking. And I have a feeling that when I find it, I’ll know.
And you always start by snooping around people’s bathrooms. Even with witches.
Good witch, bad witch, white magic, black magic. Are there such things? Are there any differences, or are we talking about nothing but teams? For all I know I’m just stuck in the middle of a contest between East Coast and West Coast, between the Celtics and Lakers.
And maybe I don’t give a damn which side wins. I’m not a fan.
But I don’t know yet, and I am finally aware that I don’t have a lot of time to decide. I know that, whoever all these people are and whatever it is they are really fighting over, there is a war going on inside me right now, and I believe—truly believe for the first time—that my better half may lose. Because I feel it: a darkness, an awfulness of potential that has never quite hit home before.
I paw around in their bathroom like a petty criminal, like a sleazy dinner guest, and all I find is bathroom stuff. Not particularly evil bathroom stuff unless you happen to hate pink or think there’s something very wrong with strawberry-scented hand soap and shampoo and air freshener and toilet cleaner and toothpaste.
I slip out of the bathroom, but instead of going where I’m supposed to go, I head down the hall. I peek into one door, which must be a guest bedroom because it is so perfectly neat and orderly, so perfectly preserved with matching purple everything, that it couldn’t possibly be used regularly. Further along, I encounter the same thing in the next room, where the colors are browns, but the effect is the same. A museum reproduction of a contemporary bedroom, or a room in a hotel nobody comes to.
There is only one more bedroom apparently, which has me wondering what the setup is, whether the Spences really even live here at all. I cannot resist examining the last door, carefully creaking it open and poking my head in…
… to be assaulted by the most foul stench ever, and a scene to match it. I slam the door, worrying that I have attracted attention, and I wait a few seconds to see if there is a reaction. There is none. The room, walls, windows, massive sprawling bed, I can still see it all, and surely smell it all up in my sinuses, as I lean my head against the door and hold on to the knob tightly, as if the whole mess will be trying to get out after me.
Every surface is coated, throbbing, glistening, seeming to be alive, as if it all belonged in the belly of some heaving beast. It is so powerful, the smell of decay and dead flesh, that only magic could confine it to this room alone. I have never wanted more to turn tail and get away. My breath is coming in gasps now, for fear of what is behind the door and what it means about the people downstairs.
But this is what I have come looking for. I sincerely wish I had the luxury of cowardice right now, but I will not, cannot run. And I cannot believe myself when I open the door once more.
“Holy shit,” I say as I pull violently away from the door, slamming it again, then staggering past it to the end of the hall. There is another, smaller door at the end here, that, when I open it, reveals stairs that lead up into darkness, into the attic.
I pause, to give myself one last chance to quit. Minutes are piling up, and it is some kind of miracle nobody has come looking for me. I must simply depend on that miracle to continue, because there is no way I can turn back now that I’ve come this far.
The attic is as still and odorless a place as the other was vile and boiling with decay. I feel my way around at first, waving my hands about, looking for a light. It is freezing. I see my breath, silver, even though the atmosphere is ebony blackness.
I walk directly into a string, no, a rope, hanging from above, and I pull it.
The light that comes on, comes across, sort of melts into the room, is all red and distorting. I try to make out shapes, to make out the dimensions of the room, the pitch of the roof, but I cannot. I can see no depth at all as I walk, no height either. I can see, in the reddened glow, just a mere foot or two in front of my eyes. It’s as if the light is not coming from above, not from sconces on the walls, or even from beneath me, but from me, and moving with me, like some kind of murky, red, miner’s headlight.
It leads me just as far as my nose and refuses to tell me what is beyond. It dares me to go on unknowing.
I do.
It is so freezing. I feel my hands stiffening, watch the plumes of my silver breath drift from my mouth like irradiated dry ice. I walk and walk and walk through this stuff forever, not knowing what I am about to trip over, but going forward and somehow never stumbling on anything as the space just goes on and on. I know that eventually there must be something out ahead, and
I am scared to numbness over it, but nothing in me will allow me to stop. I fear stopping now, as if to make the fear sandwich complete, and I push on ahead faster and faster—not running yet, but not far from it.
It sounds like pavement under my feet, like the particular click and sluck you make when walking a rain-wet city street at night. I cover a whole block, two and ten and half a mile.
Bang. I have run smack into something hard and contoured that I never saw, never saw coming for even a second before hitting it. It is like a person, only with a concrete skeleton underneath. I am down on my ass, holding my face, wondering if I have broken my nose.
I get slowly back to my feet, and as I push myself up I realize the floor is something like marble. And it is wet, like with condensation from the heat seeping up from the world below, coming up against this ice world where I am right now.
I still can’t see anything when I stand up. I have to step forward, step a little closer, to figure out what is ahead.
I step closer, then closer. This must be where I met it. But I do not meet it. I step and I step, more carefully than before, with my hands out in front of me, feeling my way.
Where is it? What is it?
“Hey,” I call out, and hear a nothingness, a vacuum that instantly swallows all sound. “Hey,” again, and the sound of my voice is killed the instant it escapes, like a record suddenly played backward, then suddenly stopped.
Stopped. Like myself. When I realize, eventually, that my footfalls on the snappy, hard ground are no longer even making a sound, I freeze.
There is nothing. I feel it in the depths of me, that there is nothing but nothingness ahead of me. It is freezing and silent where I stand, surrounded by a more absolute nothingness than I have ever imagined possible, an aloneness that defies any description of merely being without friendship, love, or even company.
I think about company now, the company downstairs. Would I hear if anyone called me? Am I still in the house? Am I still alive? There is just so much nothingness here.
And there is more of it ahead. Infinitely.
I have been walking and running, I believe, for miles now, and I cannot see a way back. I turn one hundred and eighty degrees, and hope.
Carefully but determinedly, I take my first steps, my dull red beam barely leading the way.
Until I bump again into the thick, velvet rope hanging down from above. The rope that turned on the red light, not far from the door.
It’s as if I haven’t gone anywhere.
I pull the rope.
“I told you,” I think I hear Eartha’s voice say as all goes totally black, “it’s the second door on the right.”
“Hey,” I say, feeling around again. My voice carries now, atmosphere returns, but I get no response. I go forward, looking for that original door, find it, push through.
And into that awful, boiling stench of a room, with the living walls, the dead-thing soup of a floor. It is roasting—it is so incredibly foul. I stagger from one wall to another to another and find no doors, just walls warm and wet to the touch, until I come to the bed, the headboard, set up like a sort of shrine where the pillows should be. I look up over the headboard, up on the wall, and I see what appears to be a huge oil painting, vivid as life, somehow with a life of its own.
It is a life-size portrait of him.
Long black robes, long black hair, much longer and darker than the man has now, his hands are stretched out in front of him, palms down, displaying his rings.
He stares down at you, wherever you move, with those unmistakable, gray-green mismatched eyes.
I have both hands covering my mouth now. The smell is overwhelming.
He is younger in the picture, maybe ten years older than I am now, but I could almost swear this painting is of me.
But then, it could never be me. Because there I am behind him, to his right. Opposite my mother, who is behind and to his left. Chuck is at his feet.
My god.
I stand so calmly I am worried. So without emotion and without grounding that I split down the middle and instantly worry that something is wrong with me, that I am somehow a part of this whole rancid scene, rather than an appropriately horrified observer.
I walk the edges of the room, feeling around the bubbling, weeping walls. I feel around until I feel a door shape. Without thinking, without caring, I push and tear and work my way through the awful, thick, viscous film of it.
And emerge into the bright second-floor hallway.
Dry, unmarked, unsoiled. As I was before.
And once again, as I pull myself together mentally and emotionally, the memory of time hits me. I have been up here for so long, there can be no doubt among the Spences that I have seen what I’ve seen. I want to move myself elsewhere, out of this house, because I have never wanted to tangle with either of them, and I now want it much less. But of course, there is Eleanor.
I walk down the stairs—expecting chaos, retribution—and return … to a scene much as it was before. Coffee and cinnamon pecan rolls and blueberry-cranberry pie aromas fill the room, along with the low hum of conversation.
Dr. Spence turns one eye on me as I cross to my place. Eleanor’s attention remains fixed on him.
My heart is beating three billion times a second. It is coming now, has to be coming now, confrontation, something.
I look to Eartha. She is eating pie, unconcerned. I am covered in cold sweat as I wait for her to react, but she doesn’t. Could I possibly be getting away with it?
“Sorry,” I say, tentatively.
“Sorry? What’d you do, block the toilet?”
“No, sorry about the time.”
“What about the time?” she says, taking a sip of coffee.
I look at my watch. I have been gone no time.
None.
“Nothing,” I say. But I am still far from believing my luck.
“You want some pie?” she asks politely.
“No,” I say, “but I could sure go for a gulp of that brandy you have sitting there.”
She gives it to me, bless whatever it is these people have in place of souls. And for the rest of the evening I sit in a kind of shell shock, nibbling a bit of roll, taking a sip of coffee laced with brandy, and mostly staring off into the vastness of absolute nowhere.
The adults are having what seems to be a perfectly charmed evening. Chuck has given up trying to disrupt the proceedings, and thankfully some welldeveloped sense has told Eartha to leave me completely alone.
I want to leave, of course, want to get away from whatever the hell kind of evil these people have got going for them, but I can’t seem to move. And I don’t want to draw attention to what has happened.
Because, unbelievably, it seems I really have gotten away with it. Somehow, in the course of things, time got totally jacked, and it was like I never left.
Did I do that? Could I do that?
There may be some useful, not-so-bad, magical shit in this bag yet.
We are finally released from dinner after what seems to be a hundred thousand hours at that table. It may very well have been, with all the time-gymnastics at work.
The Spences wave at us all the way down the road, for as long as they can see us, which is probably a quarter mile of straight path. Every time I look over my shoulder they are still there, lit by the porch lights, still at it, arm in arm and chilling.
Finally it is back to me and Chuck and Eleanor and one sweet, honest piece of country road. Sanity.
“I want to move, Eleanor,” is my first statement when it comes time to assess the evening.
“What?” she says, incredulous.
I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I was hoping to catch her still coming down from whatever dopey agreeable spell the good doctor had her under. Unfortunately, detox time appears to be instantaneous.
“I don’t like it here anymore,” I say.
“Anymore? Marcus, we just got here.”
“Well, long enough to tell. I get a bad feeling
from Blackwater, Eleanor. I want to go. Just you and me and Chuck. And far away this time, like Alaska or Wyoming or one of those sparsely populated places.”
“Marcus,” she says warmly, putting a long arm around my shoulders and forcing us to walk awkwardly but not uncomfortably. “Marcus, you have had a bad time, and you still have to get through it, but you will. You mustn’t blame Blackwater. Blackwater is a perfectly lovely place. It’s got everything we need, right here.”
And everything we don’t, I’m thinking, and when Chuck ambles right up and bumps me from the opposite side, I know he agrees.
“Maybe Alaska will have everything we need,” I say.
She sighs indulgently. “It’s not just that this is a pleasant place, Marcus. I am establishing myself here. I think I have a future here, with the college, with my work with Dr. Spence.”
Shocks, like little dangerous fireworks, go off when she says his name, and I do not like it at all. There is something in the way that she says his name, something stronger than what was in there earlier, and it bodes very ill, I think.
“Eleanor,” I protest.
“Stop,” she says. “You cannot run from your troubles, Marcus. We carry our troubles with us—all of us do. It is a mistake to go looking for external solutions to internal difficulties. It is a trap, it is a diversion, and when you go about things that way, they always catch up to you in the end.”
As she mentions this last bit, there is a screech—followed naturally by Chuck’s mad barking—as a large bird, a hawk, makes what looks like a suicide bomb attack at us from straight above.
“Jesus,” I say, grabbing Eleanor and huddling, without exactly going down to the ground.
At the lowest point, just as the hawk changes course and begins his ascent, Chuck makes an incredible leap, rising a full seven feet off the ground in his lunge for the bird.
It screeches again as Chuck snares silver tailfeathers in his front teeth and falls back to the ground. He lands on his feet and trots proudly to me.
