When Samantha was six, she watched her mother tend to her garden from her bay window reading nook. She’d pretend to study a book as she watched Cynthia lay a cheek to the parakeet-green grass and snip the strands into uniform with a sharp set of scissors. Then her mother would stand, dressed in a full-skirted tea-length dress, and wave a manicured hand at Samantha. Her bright white teeth, small in contrast to her low-set gums, shone from the garden’s edge and illuminated the living room. Then she would flick her fiery curls behind her shoulder in a tangerine helix before crouching to tend to the delicate membranes of the candy-wrapper flowers. Samantha desperately wanted to join her mother outside, and place the petals in her mouth, convinced that the mosaic of purples, blues, and pinks would melt on her tongue.
However, Samantha was not allowed outside. Not because she wanted to bite the heads from her mother’s flowers, but because Cynthia could not abide muddy knees nor dirt-speckled dresses, and Samantha was prone to both of these things and worse. Every day she was picked, pecked, and pinched, and her scalp was perpetually pink from the scraping fangs of Cynthia’s comb. All bound up in lace and ribbons, Samantha was force-fed femininity and choked it down, until Cynthia met her fate in red, and Samantha regurgitated satin onto the floor.
Samantha, pretending to care about the princesses in her picture book, watched the whole event transpire, her baby teeth bared as her jaw dropped an inch. Cynthia, dressed in a blue checkered dress and a pair of yellow pumps, climbed a rickety ladder with a bucket of paint. After her husband traded her in for a younger doll, all her rage was harnessed into being house-proud, and she thought the gutters would look better in a vivid shade of crimson. However, no sooner had she dipped the brush in paint than she fell backward, clinging to the ladder with all her might. The first responders say she might have lived had the white picket fence not punctured her middle and the red can of paint not dented her skull. Samantha watched the paint mix with the blood, and as the two reds swirled together, the plants drank deeply, and the roses that followed had never been redder.
Life already achromatized by grief, Samantha was further subjected to a bleached and beige world when her father, Brian, moved her from suburb to city. He said it was for work, but Samantha theorized he couldn’t stand the sight of flowers anymore. They rented an apartment in a building owned by rats, and Samantha would hear the fuzzy creatures tinkering late into the night, collecting thumbtacks and needles to wage the ever-losing war against hordes of armored cockroaches. She rooted for the rats, even on wet nights when her home smelled of wood shavings and rodent piss, and she couldn’t sleep for their conversational squeaking.
Brian didn’t last long in the city, but he didn’t move them back to the suburbs. Instead, he took a handgun and clinked it against cheap veneers, pulled the trigger, and blasted rose petals against a motel wall. Nothing poetic grew from the splintered bone shards of his grief-assisted euthanasia, and the motel room was back up and running within twenty-four hours.
After that, Samantha was sent to St. John’s Orphanage. Run by an unkindness of raven-faced women with long, gaunt faces and awful crooked teeth, who’d flap their cloth wings as Samantha ran past, bloodied and wild, an aggrieved child hot on her quick heels. The nuns snapped their beaks often, and Samantha has the scars to prove it. Amongst them is a thin pale slit on her right buttock, left by a swift stick and a firm grip. The nuns haunt her dreams more than her parents do; they appear as gargoyles on the roof of her home, waiting to snatch her non-existent children up and carry them away screaming into the night sky.
At sixteen, she fled God’s house with a chocolate-haired girl named Anna, and together they stole a car and hit the road running. They didn’t stop until the car ran out of gas and they found themselves in an arid small town surrounded by saguaro cacti and coyotes. Anna cut Samantha’s hair that night with a knife sharper than Cynthia’s prized scissors, and Samantha slicked it back with grease and sweat. After planting a kiss on Anna’s chapped lips, she looked in the cracked rear-view mirror, and kept slicing until the suffix ‘antha’ was severed from her name forever.
At twenty-six, Anna and Sam were married—not legally, but they had the rings and the love, and that was good enough at the time. They shared a small suburban house, and, whilst Sam worked daily on their garden, it never grew right, and the petals only made her sick. Nothing grew in Anna’s womb either, and Sam refused to use her own, so their bed expanded its reach until they could no longer see each other under the covers.
By thirty-six, Anna had moved Betsey into the house that Sam had painted, and Sam moved into a lonely single-wide outside of town. Betsey was bigger, butcher, and richer than Sam, and together, she and Anna planted seed after seed until their house was swarming with babies. Sam watched from afar as she drove back and forth to her job at the local auto shop in a Mustang older than she was. All the children looked like Anna and Sam couldn’t help but wonder if she’d cursed her when they were together, or if it was just bad luck.
At forty-six, she let the hum of the generator lull her to sleep like the snores of a lover, and tried to not let the night-time eat her alive.
Today, she awoke to thunder and an unfamiliar sound, and found that she’d fallen asleep with a gun and bottle of Jack, and wondered what she’d been planning to do before she blacked out. She listens intently and deduces that the sound is the roar of tires on a dirt road. She peers out of her grime-caked window and watches a van approach in a plume of desert smoke. A young man, dressed in a mailman’s uniform, hops out with a letter in hand. He pushes the envelope through the veil of spider web covering her mailbox slot, and Sam opens the door, dressed in a t-shirt and worn boxers, and waves, but he’s gone before she can strike up conversation.
She retrieves the letter from the sticky strands and finds it scarred with glassy patches of damp and stale coffee rings. She brings it inside, and leaves the door open to air out her home. After taking a sip from the bottle, she tears into the envelope. Keys fall out with the letter, three of them on a rusted rung. She puts them to the side and begins to read.
Dear Samantha,
If you’re reading this, I am dead, or very nearly there. A few days ago, I was admitted into hospice and I know it can’t be long now. Frankly, I hope Death hurries the hell up. I can’t stand the look on everyone’s faces. It’s cancer, of course. Bowel cancer, initially, which spread rapidly to just about everywhere else. Which means, given your age, you should get yourself checked, as it’s often genetic, and as I’m the one who gave birth to you, there’s a decent chance you’ve inherited my shortcomings. I know that’s burying the lede and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for a lot of things.
Sam squints at the legible handwriting as if it’s difficult to understand and re-reads the passage. She reads it five more times, attempting to understand, but the information sits, a pool of tar atop a blocked drain, and she has no choice but to keep reading.
I’m sorry I didn’t keep you. When I became pregnant with you, I knew I had no choice. I couldn’t let you grow up in this house, in this family. I thought by giving you away, you’d escape the curse, but it wants blood, not proximity. My cancer has weakened it, and I thought it might kill it, but as Death begins to pace my porch, the curse begins to resurrect, and I know that it has latched on to you. I’m sorry to have not lived longer, and I’m sorry to introduce you to Sorry.
Sam finds herself winded, and after regaining her breath, she fills her glass to its rounded edge and collapses on the couch with the letter still in hand. As the blankets swallow her into plush-recess and morning rain patters the windows, she continues to read.
Sorry is a clown, though not of the human variety, which I know will be hard for you to understand. I grew up with him, so I don’t know quite how to explain.
He was given to my great-great-grandmother, Mildred, in 1907 as a gift, and though he entertained her for a time, Mildred eventually grew tired of him. Her toying turned to cruelty, and in turn, molded Sorry into a monster. He snapped and killed her mother that same year, and the blood he drank from her body has bound our family to him ever since. So, let me present to you an offer. I leave to you my house, my fortune, my land, and in exchange, you will look after Sorry until your dying day, at which point, the bloodline will end, and so will he. Let our family tree burn, but enjoy the warmth while you can.
If you choose to accept my offer—which I urge you to do, lest another family obtain the house and Sorry with it—please read the following carefully:
The large key is for the front door, the medium is for the back door, and the smallest one is for Sorry’s door. Unlock it upon arrival and lock it again if you leave the house. He will not bother you and is harmless during the day. All you need to do is supply him with milk and meat, and he’ll be the sweetest pet.
However, at night, he changes.
So, you will find that in every bedroom there is a door bolt. Whatever room you choose, I advise you use the lock as soon as the sun sets and do not emerge until it rises. Good luck, my darling daughter, I’m sorry we never met.
Eternal love,
Beatrice Webb.
Sam sips at her drink and feels the liquid slosh in sync with the sickening rock of her trailer in the now-furious winds. Lightning strikes again, and for a moment, she sees a man in the middle-distance, posed and frozen, watching her through the window. When the secondary flicker arrives, she realizes it’s only a strange-shaped rock, but she shuts the blinds anyways before flipping over the letter. There’s an address on the back and Sam looks out at the inky black sky, imagining what it’ll look like in the Lone Star State.
In the following weeks, she makes the necessary arrangements to start again in Texas, and once the trailer is sold and her belongings are packed, she hits the road, trying to ignore the thought of clowns. Her biological mother was clearly not in her right mind when she wrote the letter, so Sam dismisses Sorry as a fever dream and death-wrought delusion.
When she arrives at the house—which is taller than it is wide—she notices that it leans to the left on half-sunken foundations, and cranes her neck to get a good look at it through the rusty gate. Its white, like sun-bleached bone picked clean by desert-dwelling wildlife, and though it’s a beautiful corpse, its carapace is ramshackle and in need of more than a lick of paint. She hops out of the still-running car and opens the gate. It screams as she forces it, its flaky russet dermis raw from decades of misuse.
As she continues to drive, the wheels crunch over the grass, dried out from drought after a heatwave. The surrounding trees are in a similar state, as are the vines that climb the columns and face of the building.
Once parked, she approaches the house and uses one of the slender pillars that support the drooping portico to heave her leaden body onto the porch. The two days of twelve-hour drives had not been kind to her long-suffering knees, and as she shuffles towards the double doors, the painted white porch floorboards depress like piano keys. The doors, made of oak, each sport an iron door knocker shaped like a bull’s head. As Sam had discovered in her brief trip to the library to use the internet, the Webbs were meat-money rich, or they were before Beatrice had to sell most of the land and all of the cattle to afford maintaining the enormous house.
Consequently, though Beatrice had been faithful to her word about leaving everything to Sam, Beatrice and her daughter had very different interpretations of the word ‘fortune.’ Sam envisioned swimming through gold and sleeping in sheets made of filthy dollar bills, but when the check came, what she got was $23,000.
And as she steps into the house, she realizes every drop of it will be spent on repairs. The windows are boarded up, so only the open doorway illuminates the ancient vestibule ahead. The pale light from the overcast sky sketches her, long and thin, across the warped floors.
She enters and the door swings shut behind her as she fumbles for a light switch. Her fingers quickly find one next to a patch of peeling wallpaper, but the bulb flickers on, shorts out with a pop. She sighs, wishing she’d remembered a flashlight. Her phone, being a relic itself, is not a valid option, and she prays the problem is the bulb, not the fuse.
As her eyes adjust, she spots a side table to the left side of the room. It’s occupied by a fringe-shaded lamp and piled high with unread letters belonging to her mother. Sam presses the toggle on its brass throat, and its failure to ignite confirms the worst. So, she resorts to plucking a dusty sconce—complete with skinny pillar candle—from the console, and with a satisfying clink from her Zippo, the wick takes to the flame and casts a warm glow across its cadaverous surroundings.
Sam holds the candle to the artwork above the side table and admires the oil-painted cattle, white and red, grazing in the fields. The herd meanders through the grass and she can almost hear their distant bellows. Sam closes her eyes, enjoying their happy song, before a thump from upstairs silences the animals. She starts, reopening her eyes, and finds the figures petrified in paint once again, and while the sound from above does not repeat itself, it unnerves her all the same, no matter how much she brushes it off as the building clicking its joints.
She turns about the room, noticing that every painting is of animals, primarily cattle, but some horses and a few dogs. The dogs are all English Setters with straight backs, speckled coats, and floppy ears, surrounded by game birds of all kinds; ducks, geese, coots, rails, snipe, woodcocks, and doves, glassy-eyed and broken, dead from bullets before the dogs could wrap their maws around their breakable necks.
As she turns back to the open door, she gasps, drops the candle, and nearly burns the house down in the process. She bends, her knees creaking as she does, and retrieves the extinguished stick. Clink, woosh, warmth.
A blackened mirror, framed with chipped faux-gold, reveals a spectral twin to her. A ghastly pale face with no eyes, underlit by the flame in her hand. She chuckles as she approaches it, and the raspy intonation echoes up the threadbare stairs. The closer she gets, the more she recognizes herself, and she slicks the escaped strands of her short gray hair back into place at her temples. The knots of her knuckles are cracked, and her nails filthy with oil and grease. She adjusts her white tank top and silver chain with arthritic fingers.
Sam faces the stairs on the right side of the room. She had ignored them thus far due to the dark pooling on their landing. As she fiddles with the keys—precisely the littlest one—her heart pangs outside of regular rhythm, and she decides to continue ignoring their unlit presence, staying in the comfort zone that the first floor provides. Pulling herself away from the impenetrable black, she turns left, through an oak door with a calloused metal handle, and finds herself in a dining room. The candlestick sends light through the slatted chairs and projects jail-cell bars onto the white-washed walls.
It’s sparsely decorated and, like the vestibule, is predominantly white with umber-colored accents. The mahogany table and chairs are lacquered in dust, except for the polished spot at the end closest to the door. The place where Beatrice must’ve enjoyed her solitary meals. The chair sits at an angle, as if occupied by her ghost. Sam thinks, later, she’ll sit in the chair next to the haunted one and have a first and final meal with her birth mother, and then, gently, she’ll push the chair back into place.
Above the mantle of a boarded-up fireplace is a painting—again encapsulated in flaking gold—of a severe-looking woman dressed in a conservative brown dress with a lace collar. Her hair is parted sharply down the middle, a flash of white scalp demonstrating the thinness of the chestnut strands, and pulled into a braided bun. Sam knows who it is before she reads the name; Mildred Webb, the petulant curse-bringer.
A handful of photographs sit beneath the portrait that Sam can’t bear to look at for long. They’re not much older than she is, and set in free-standing frames. Most of them are of Beatrice; her slender figure, sometimes pregnant, draped in peasant dresses, her charcoal hair nearly waist-length. She had high-cheekbones and foxlike features, and Sam sees much of her own face reflected in the developed film. Some of the photos are of Sam’s grandparents, who appear in stark contrast to their flower child. Wrinkled and deadpan, they stand in the fields surrounding the house. To Sam, they resemble American Gothic, with their farming tools and cross-bearing necklaces, and she can’t decide whether this amuses or frightens her.
Sam moves away from them but lingers in the room, admiring the fine china in their glass-covered cases. Yet, the longer she stays, the more Mildred’s eyes burn into her exposed skin, and she moves into the next room to escape the penetrating gaze.
The attached room is the kitchen and the orange bulb of the candle multiplies in the white-tiled walls. Sam feels relief as the illumination points out a spattering of mod-cons throughout. As she approaches the refrigerator, the stench of rotting meat hits her, even through the closed door. Getting the electricity back up and running jumps to the top of her list of priorities as she finds trash bags and moves the rotting off-cuts into the black plastic membrane.
She holds it at arm’s length as she stalks back through the kitchen and dining room and the yet-unopened passageway, searching for more trash to expunge from the ancient beast’s guts. The door opens into a drawing-room, half-concealed by white sheet ghosts in the shape of old furniture. Sam soon finds something else to throw away; rotten peonies reduced to mush in an antique vase. They melt between her fingers as she throws the putrid flowers in with the rest of the organic matter.
Sam places the candle on a corner table and looks around the room. It’s spacious and empty like all the others, and Beatrice’s ghost manifests in the form of a worn salmon-pink armchair with its seat dented to the shape of a bony backside, a half-eaten packet of crackers on the table, and an empty mug of coffee beside it. Sam adds the former to the bag with slight hesitation, and watches her mother’s limpid form move from plush surface to open doorway, bare feet grazing splinters as she shuffles. Sam can feel the weight of the tumor in her own belly, the arches in her feet flattening into flippers as she mimics Beatrice’s path around the furniture.
When her mind can focus past the spirit of her mother, she begins to notice the clowns. The porcelain clowns, dressed in black and white—more Pierrot than Circus—crowd most surfaces. Over the mantlepiece is a portrait. His innocent face pushes Sam back towards the far wall, his sadness tangible. Sorry stares at her as if he wants something, but she has nothing to give the pathetic oil amalgamation of Beatrice’s imagination, and with aching ankles, she takes her candle and the bag of trash and leaves the room behind.
She dumps the latter on the porch, swaps it for a suitcase, and as she heaves the clunky thing with its broken wheel towards the door, she spots a man on the other side of the age-old gates.
He’s young and wiry, dressed in a wife-beater and denim, and his cowboy hat shields his face from the sun and Sam’s vision. All she can make out from the shadows is a deeply dimpled chin and a golden canine tooth. He spits in the bushes as he waves. “Hey there,” he calls out, his accent thick. “Here I was thinking this place was abandoned.”
“Nope,” she replies, “It was my mom’s, and now it’s mine.”
“Your momma’s? Well, I didn’t think Beatrice had any kids.”
“She didn’t raise me,” Sam says, tone terse. “But she left everything to me.”
“All right, I didn’t mean no offense,” the man says, spitting again. “What’s your name?”
“Sam.”
“You live alone, Sam?”
She thinks to lie but finds herself shrugging and saying, “Nope, just me.” A hush falls between them, and Sam excuses herself. “I gotta get going. Lots of work to do on this old place.”
The man laughs wryly. “Well, I bet there is. I’ll be seeing you, Sam.”
He doesn’t move from his perch, and she slips away and locks the front door behind her. Luggage in hand, she moves her mind from the man and decides to ascend to the next level of her new home.
The dust that plumes under her boots smells ancestral, and when she thinks about it, she realizes it is. If dust is made of skin, then she’s living in an ancestral urn. It’s going to be hard to clean, she thinks as she pulls her graying palm from the handrail, literally and emotionally.
At the top of the stairs, she faces a wall and a window hidden by heavy drapes, and when she turns around, a hallway unfolds before her, long and dark, with innumerable doors leading to innumerable rooms. Pressed close to the right-hand side is another, steeper staircase, and she stands at the foot of it with the candle. An ornate door sits at the top of the gradually thinning flight; painted Sacramento green, the carved faces in the primordial pea soup whisper to her, and the keyhole calls for the little silver key in her pocket.
When she snaps out of it, she finds herself six steps closer to the door and quickly turns around, extinguishing the candle in her haste. The whispers get louder as footsteps walk up to the other side of the green door.
Sam hurries back down, her suitcase knocking into knees and cleaving into calf. Fumbling with candlestick and doorknob, she flings herself into one of the rooms at random, and seeks refuge on the other side. Dropping her suitcase, she forces her hands steady and relights the candle. She finds herself in a large bedroom with an iron bed frame covered by a familial quilt, and in the far corner, next to the dresser, is a narrow white door. An ensuite reveals itself on the other side, complete with a clawfoot tub and floral floor tiles, and not being one to reject luxury, she decides that this will be her room.
Her suitcase finds a temporary home on its back, a makeshift wardrobe until she can bring herself to unpack, and the candle sits atop the dresser. It guides her as she opens the trunk at the foot of the bed and changes the lived-in sheets that cover the sweat-stained mattress. She perches on its edge to rest her body while changing pillowcases, and the springs groan beneath her weight. She’d give anything to lean back and sleep for a day, or a week, or forever, but she changes the pillowcases and gets back up. She starts tucking the fitted sheet, and as she reaches the cold metal headboard, she notices the bedside table’s drawer is ajar. Abandoning her task, she opens it all the way, revealing a journal, which Sam handles with intrigue.
The cover is tan, and the texture makes her think of pigskin rather than the typically used cattle leather. The pages inside are clumped together, as if it has sat out in the rain, but a few pull away from the wad and are legible despite the intricate cursive. Written atop the first page is, ‘The Diary of Mildred Webb,’ and the date below reads, ‘The 4th of January 1907.’
As Sam’s eyes flit about the page, Mildred peels herself away from her sullen dining-room portrait, and slivers slickly from the shelf and onto the floor. Her hooped-skirt and corseted-waist turn her silhouette into an oddly portioned marionette as she glides from room to room and susurrates up the stairs. Eventually, she finds a resting place in the corner of Sam’s bedroom, looming over her, illuminated by the bioluminescence of her spectral ectoplasm. She’s uglier in person, Sam thinks, the oil painting having concealed rotten teeth and a hollow-eyed expression.
When she speaks, her tongue is black and pointed like a leech, and her lifeless eyes stare through Sam’s corporeal form and focus on the damp spot on the ceiling. “Beloved, betrothed, blue,” she whispers, the strain in her voice made visible by the taught tendons in her throat. She continues to speak via Sam’s morbid curiosity, though as the vision becomes more real, Sam resents her imagination.
My storybook romance was punctuated by an untimely death at the hands of cholera. Our wedding day was supposed to be tomorrow. For weeks, my wedding dress has hung in the wardrobe in my bedroom, and at night, the door opens, and I see it dance in the wind, the bodice filled out by my own merry, married ghost. Sometimes I rise from bed and join her in dance, and we whisper in delight at the idea of becoming one. She needed a body, and I needed to be married. How silly of us, so unaware that it would never come to pass. When I next see my ghost, I don’t suppose she’ll be dancing in the dress. I think she’ll just be hanging.
When he died, his mother took me to his room. I didn’t remember his room being so large, nor his bed so tall, and him so tiny. His mouth was agape, eyes wide, all framed by the skin of silverfish. Bedding wrapped around his frail body like a chrysalis from which he will never hatch. That bony creature was not my Edward, and with nothing left to say goodbye to, I turned my back on him and ran from the room.
The funeral occurred a few days later. It was a rainy, outdoors affair. As they lowered Edward—all wrapped up in linen and pitch—into the ground, I begged to be buried with him. At night, I dream of lying naked in Edward’s coffin and being devoured by the same maggots currently eating him. I want our flesh entangled in the bellies of insects.
Sam wants her to stop, but her hand turns the page, and Mildred keeps speaking, despite the flesh on her delicate bones coming loose and her eye sockets struggling to keep the eyeballs contained.
Today, Father called for me from the bottom of the stairs. He’d just returned from a trip to the city, and as I stared down at his mustachioed face, I knew that he had a surprise for me, and I descended the stairs in my stinking undergarments with vigor.
I rounded the corner into the drawing-room and froze in shock. Standing in the middle of the room was a clown. He looked more like a doll than a person. Dressed in all white, he wore a tall pointed hat and a frilly outfit complete with puffy pantaloons, knee-high stockings, and bells on his collar.
His delicate face was painted white, smooth as porcelain, and his eyebrows were painted as thin lines, bowed with sadness. His mouth was black; the painted lips, rounded at the edges, were drawn into a permanent semi-circular smile, though I could see that the man behind the makeup’s mouth was held in a severe line. His impossibly dark eyes, framed by small triangles, were filled with the vulnerability of an infant. It made me want to kick him.
Father announced loudly that he’d bought me a clown. I informed my father that one cannot just buy a clown. Father shook his head and said that I was wrong, that this clown was all mine for as long as I would have him. All I would have to do is name him, which would seal the deal.
“Fine. I will name him Sorry because I’m sorry that he’s here,” I said, and Papa sighed at my choice of name, but Sorry began to do a jig, kicking his feet up, swinging his arms back and forth, jingling all the while. However, his face remained utterly emotionless, the painted smile doing all the work for him.
He danced for an extraordinarily long time, and when I became unsettled, I snapped. “Sorry, sit,” I screamed, and he did as I asked, immediately dropping to the floor and crossing his legs like a schoolchild. It was then that I realized Sorry would do anything that I asked.
Mildred recites another entry with a childish glee. Sam’s had enough, but the tulpa in the room keeps talking, keeps her hands turning.
Sorry is a delight. Never have I felt so attended to or entertained. He will not speak nor sing, though he does almost anything else I desire. He’s a sweet little creature, and in exchange for his services, I leave him a bowl of food scraps before bed; I never see him eat, but the plate is always licked clean in the morning. Even the bones and gristle disappear!
Mama doesn’t like Sorry, no matter how happy he makes me. She’s uncomfortable in his presence, whether he’s with me or alone. She says she sometimes walks up the stairs only to find him at the top, staring down at her, and that his night-time wanderings fill her with terror.
Today, she told me she wanted him gone, and when I screamed at her, she slapped me, as she has so many times before. When I ran out into the hallway, Sorry scampered after me. I raised a hand to him in my upset, but thought better of it and turned away. As I did so, he reached for my wrist, I believe in an act of kindness, so I turned back to him and said, “Sorry, hit yourself.” He raised a slender hand and smacked himself hard, harder than I was able, across the cheek. He flinched at the impact, confused by what he had done.
Mildred falls silent as the rest of the entries’ words become illegible where the ink blooms across the page in blue-rimmed puddles. As soon as the final period meets Sam’s pupil, Mildred begins to melt. Blue crystalline flesh degloved and skeleton exposed, Mildred offers a bony smile before turning to dust and slipping through the gaps in the floorboard.
Sam slams the journal shut and puts it back in the drawer; she’s read enough and this is one work of fiction she doesn’t care for.
She leaves the room and book behind, trying to rid Mildred’s cruel visage from her mind, and trying not to think about Sorry the clown. She turns to face the window at the top of the first flight of stairs, wanting to grab the rest of her luggage before it starts to rain, but she stops in her tracks when she looks at the thick drapes, made from rich plum-colored velvet. At first, she thinks she’s imagined it, but the fabric moves ever so slightly. When it settles, she gasps and reaches for a gun holster that isn’t there.
Somebody is standing on the other side of the curtains.
From their imprint, she’d guess that the person is a man of short stature and slender build. The description of the clown from Mildred’s diary obscures her mind’s eye, and she can almost see the painted man through the opaque curtains. It’s ridiculous, but like watching a horror movie and then being afraid to close your eyes in the shower, she knows she’s being silly, but she can’t simply dismiss the fear.
Life in the Nevada desert has given Sam a leathered hide and a quick tongue, so even without her gun, she takes a heavy step forward and growls, “Come out from there with your hands up. I know this house has been sitting empty for a while, but it’s mine now, and I don’t like unexpected guests.”
The person behind the curtains doesn’t move or speak, so she raises her voice. “Come on now, I can see you. I know you’re there. If you come out now, I’ll consider not calling the cops on you.” She takes another step forward. “If you’re hungry, I’ve got food. If you’re broke, I’ve got cash. But I cannot have you hiding out in my house.” The fabric-covered shape twitches but doesn’t reply. Her face grows hot from fear and anger, and she grabs a loose skirting board and wields it like a bat. “You’ve got till the count of ten before I’m coming in there after you,” she rumbles in a forcibly low register.
The intruder falls still again, and the count begins. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, no response or movement. She draws the last numbers of the count out as she gets closer and closer. She realizes by the time she calls out a slow-motion nine that she really will have to drag this person out by force. Bracing herself for impact, she takes another step forwards, and reaches out a hand, fingertips brushing velvet.
“Ten,” she hisses and draws the curtain to the side in a sharp, sweeping movement. She yelps instinctively, but there’s nobody there, only a nest of daddy long legs and blooming black spores. She shakes her head and laughs as she draws the curtain closed again. Except, as the material settles into a flatness that no longer resembles a person, the laugh catches in her throat, and she backs away from the window.
Hearing a sudden sound above her, she looks up at the gappy boards. Footsteps run along creaking floorboards. “What the hell?” she whispers, and as she turns to the green door, she knows she can no longer ignore it.
The staircase acts as an escalator, and carries her up the passage in a fugue. Once she reaches the top, not having remembered moving her limbs at all, she teeters precariously on the top step, pressed against the door.
She fishes the keys from her pocket, and as metal finds metal, a rush of light-treading feet and jingling bells run at the door. The person stops before they collide with it, and Sam nearly falls back as if they ran into her instead. She takes a deep breath and looks at the shadow of their feet, mirroring her own boots. Exhaling, she turns the key until it clicks, and pushes the door open. Whoever is in the room follows its arc and hides behind it, keeping a slab of wood between their two bodies.
Sam glances at the cot pressed against the left wall and the chamber pot beside it. It reeks of rot, and the room feels like a prison cell.
The person, still hiding behind the door, drops to their knees, and Sam feels the vibrations of their shakes in the floorboards. Fighting every instinct that she possesses, Sam steps into the room and, from a respectable distance, looks behind the door.
“No fucking way,” she wheezes, as if sucker-punched. “No, this isn’t possible.”
A clown is hunched over on the floor, his pointed hat wilted and his clothes filthy. Sorry cocks his head at Sam, the permanent smile painted on his face contrasting harshly with his sad, puppy-dog eyes. In a springy moment, he jumps to his feet and hops from one foot to the other, his hand outstretched, wishing to grasp but not wanting to shake.
“Hello, Sorry,” she murmurs. “I guess I’m your new caretaker.” At this, he looks upset, his angular and pretty face screwed up in a confusion that Sam isn’t sure he’s equipped to handle. “Beatrice is gone. I’m Sam.”
Sorry steps forward into the yellow light, and Sam gasps. Covering his painted flesh are a plethora of century-old wounds of varying severity. Breaks are evident in badly healed bone, and his ancient clothes indicate stabbings where slender slits are caked in century-old blood. She considers Mildred’s words, It was then that I realized Sorry would do anything that I asked, and a penny of thunderous proportions drops to the ground. Sam wonders which came first? The enforced self-mutilation or compelling him to murder her mother?
“What did that monster do to you?” she asks, feeling his wounds on her own flesh, invisible but tangible. “Would you like to come downstairs?” Sorry gives no indication of having understood the question. “Can I have your hat? I can fix it,” Sam asks, trying to smile and forcing adrenaline-infused bile down her constricting gullet. At this, Sorry shakes his head in a frantic jingling, and Sam steps back with hands raised in surrender. “I’m going to leave the door open,” she whispers, “and I’ll bring you some food and drink. You must be hungry.” Keeping her eyes on him, she retreats out of the room and moves slowly down the stairs, being careful not to run though her body begs her to.
Once in the only familiar room, she bolts the door shut and collapses on the half-made bed. She shakes violently, her mind sending her body into shock rather than trying to process what she’s seen. All the while, she listens out for Sorry, more animal than human, expecting him to creak down the stairs, but he doesn’t budge. So, after a while, she unlocks the door and continues about her day as best she is able.
In the kitchen, she pulls a gas station sandwich from her backpack and plates it, carries it up the stairs, and leaves it on the landing outside Sorry’s room. He watches her reproachfully from his cot, like a rescue dog at the pound, and like those mistreated mutts, once she turns her back, he scampers across the floor, grabs the plate, and demolishes the offerings gratefully.
She locks his door as she heads to the store. Sorry needs milk and meat, and she needs groceries for herself too. When she returns with everything they need, including cleaning supplies, she unlocks his door again. She leaves his door shut but lets him know it’s unlocked and goes back downstairs to prepare them both dinner.
When she rounds the corner to the narrow stairwell with a plate of steak and a glass of semi-skimmed, she screams, and both go smashing to the ground. Sorry is perched on the landing, illuminated by the many candles lit throughout the vicinity. At incredible velocity, he flees in terror back up to his floor, and Sam gets the dustpan and brush.
After making sure there’s no glass in his steak, she tries again, this time steeling herself against another possible sighting. Neither can be blamed. Cohabitation takes time, especially between two such different beasts. Not wanting to bother him, she leaves the new plate and glass at the bottom of his stairs and retreats back to the dining room to enjoy her own meal. The steak is the same, but she opts for wine instead of milk.
When the sun begins to set, she takes the bottle and herself to bed. Beatrice was honest about everything else, so she locks the door and hunkers down for the night. She burrows under the comforter and quilt, and reads one of the many books she brought with her while getting progressively drunk.
After a while, she hears Sorry slurp at his glass of milk through the walls, and she raises her own glass in cheers. When he starts in on the steak, she makes a mental note to buy earplugs. His wet tongue slathers over the rare meat, and teeth tear into it in large chunks.
That’s when she hears a different noise. A smashing of a window from downstairs. The kitchen, she thinks, before hearing more smashing and thumping as someone climbs inside the house. Sorry skitters down the hall on all fours before she can even put her book aside. Sam’s heart pangs. What if the intruder has a gun?
“What the fuck is that?” A man yells. She recognizes his voice.
There’s silence for a moment. She can barely hear anything over her pounding heart. The crack of breaking bone rings clear throughout the house, and Sam shudders violently. The snaps are followed by the thump of a heavy body hitting the ground. And then the bites, rips, tears, and guttural screams start. Sam is glad she doesn’t have neighbors, and she covers her ears, though it doesn’t seem to help.
When it all goes quiet, she swings her legs from her bed and pads across the room. Undoing the bolt, she peers out into the hallway and covers her mouth in horror as she sees Sorry, still on all fours, hunched at the top of the stairs. The intruder’s shoulder is trapped in Sorry’s unhinged jaw, and his razor-sharp teeth—of which there are hundreds—are hooked deep into the trapezius.
Sorry drops the man she’d encountered earlier, the one who’d asked if she lived alone. He’s reduced to a twisted pile of protruding bone and minced meat. His face is twisted into a permanent scream, and his eyes know only fear.
Sorry glances at Sam, his painted smile now an upside-down frown. He opens his mouth and hisses before latching once more and dragging the man towards the second staircase. Sam closes her door as he passes. The man’s head bumps on each wooden step, and after twenty-or-so knocks, Sorry begins his feast.
Sam climbs back into bed, realizing she lied to the corpse in the attic; she doesn’t live alone, and never will again. Sleep consumes her, and when she wakes, she’s more refreshed than she has been in years.
When she opens her door, she finds Sorry’s drooping, pointed hat on the floor, speckled with blood, and she carries it tenderly downstairs, excited to repair it for him.