The city wakes to the rhythm of daylight.
They first arrive in ones and twos. Lone boys with bicycles and newspapers, waging war against doorsteps. I count them: four, five, six. Men and women running down streets, singing aloud to music no one else hears. I count them: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. A portly official thrusting important papers and packages into every other mailbox. I count him: one.
Then they arrive by the dozens. Men and women hurrying down sidewalks, a few in dark business suits, but the majority dressed simply in plaid or jeans. Some glance down at their wrists with an impatient air before boarding the horseless carriages they call buses or the smaller ones they call cars. (Twenty-seven.) Others saunter down the road with less urgency, with dogs of various breeds and sizes scampering ahead, restrained only by the collars around their necks. (Fourteen.)
A few dogs see me and growl, baring their teeth. I bare my own teeth and immediately they are off, tearing down the street in fright like hell has come nipping at their tails, their masters helpless in their pursuit. I have little regard for animals, and I imagine the feeling is mutual. Their leashes remind me of my own. Collars are as much a form of slavery whether they encircle necks or wrists, whether they are as heavy as lead or as light as a ropestring.
Finally, they come in droves. People in rich suits and richer tastes hurrying along, their minds immersed in the petty affairs that consume their lives (thirty-eight). Children squabbling in cars on their way to school, mothers and fathers behind the wheel (sixteen). They have no reason to see me—an unavenged spirit, a nothing-more. I am not a part of their world, as much as they are no longer a part of mine. They have the rest of their lives before them, and I do not.
I often spend the passage of days in a strange haze. When there is little to attract my vengeance, I lie in unusual states of hibernation.
Some days I curl up in attics and abandoned sheds. I do not sleep, so instead I exist in a period of dreamlessness, a series of finite instances where I think little of things and dwell on the wonders of nothing. It lasts for hours or days or years, or the time it takes for a bird to flap its wings, or the time it takes for a deep breath. But soon the rage curls again, the quiet places inside me that
whisper, whisper whispering find more find more
and so I rise, driven to seek out, to
devour, to make to break to take.
I have ridden on ships and sails. I have taken to the air on steel wings. I have schooled myself in the languages of those I hunt, their culture of contradictions. I have burrowed into the skins of those who know the dark ways, those who welcome the trespass of body. I have crawled out from the thickness of blood, from the salt of the dying.
I can possess, however briefly, those close to death, or those who have known death intimately and escaped. I have learned to move among people in a hundred different ways, to linger in numerous places at once and still keep my sense of being. But today I am drifting, aimless in this moment, basking in the afterglow of the night before.
And when there is nothing else, I count.
I allow the whim to carry me farther down the street, where a lone peddler sells food from a metal stand (one). A cat on the other side of the road (one) arches its back and hisses at me, yowling its temerity, though its tail quivers and the hairs along its back bristle. People walk past, eating and tossing empty wrappers into bins. I count them: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
A young man in a tan suit stops in mid-bite to stare directly at me. Slices of bread slide unnoticed to the ground, and he begins to tremble. I move, retreating as a group of students run past (seven), laughing and giggling, and flicker out of his vision. I am occasionally seen by those cursed with a peculiar sight they themselves are rarely aware of, but I have grown skilled at evading their scrutiny once discovered. I have no quarrel with the young man, who dashes away pale and frightened, though I am sorry he sees more than he ought.
But something else commands my awareness. It is a teenage boy in a car driving past this intersection of roads. He is of average countenance, perhaps fifteen years old, with bright blue eyes and straight black hair that shoots out unnaturally from his head like spikes. He is staring out the window with a surly demeanor I have found common in many boys of this time.
But neither his features nor his behavior arrest my attention. There is something that throbs and moves from inside his clothes, restless movements both repugnant and familiar. An unnatural glow sets around him. And in his mind I taste the sweetness of home, the land of my once-birth, thousands of miles away.
The boy does not notice all this. His eyes look out on the world and pass over me, unseeing, as the car turns a corner into a smaller lane.
It stops in front of a large house where several men are moving furniture out of a large truck that says “Picking’s Movers” on its side. Tables and chairs and many more items litter the yard outside the house (sixteen). Some of these men (ten, a perfect number) are moving more in: two wooden beds, one vanity stand, sixteen assortments of electric devices, and many boxes. One mirror.
The boy gets out of the car, still scowling, with an older man of the same blue eyes, though his hair is a dirty yellow. They watch as the men move their furniture inside. I count the boxes: one, two.
“What do you think, Tark?” the older man finally asks.
The boy doesn’t answer. Ten, eleven.
“It’s nicer than our old house in Maine, don’t you think?” the man continues, ignoring the silence. “You’ll get your own room, of course—bigger, with more windows. We’ve got enough space to put up a rec room, maybe a swimming pool in the backyard once we’re done settling in. It’s only two blocks from Callie’s place, too.” Seventeen, eighteen.
Still the boy does not answer. He continues to watch the movers. The strange light persists around him, a queer dimness that radiates more than it shines.
“And we can go visit Mom next week. Dr. Aachman says she’s been feeling a lot better than the last time, and that we can go to the hospital whenever we’re ready. And now that we’re only twenty minutes from Remney’s, we can visit as often as you want.” Twenty-five, twenty-six.
A peculiar shift crosses the boy’s face, and I see emotion in him for the first time. The jaws tighten, the eyes harden, the mouth curves down. He folds his arms across his chest and a sleeve rides up, exposing a black tattoo on his forearm. Thirty-three boxes.
It is curious for a boy his age to possess tattoos of any kind.
Someone made a curious choice in the design of the tattoo on his arm. It is of two circles, the larger encompassing the smaller sphere and covered in meticulous writing, but of a language I do not understand. More symbols mark the length of his arms, climbing up to disappear, hiding under the folds of his shirt. These tattoos cause him to glow with that strange light as they hum and throb against his skin. As if suddenly aware of my scrutiny, he pulls the sleeve down.
“Dad, I’m not sure I should be visiting Mom at all,” he says.
“Don’t say that, Tark. I know she misses you.”
“Trying to scratch my eyes out is a strange way of showing just how much she misses me.” The bitterness is apparent in his voice.
“Dr. Aachman says that’s not going to happen anymore,” his father says firmly. “She’d been given the wrong kind of medication, that’s all. We’ll visit her right after your session with Miss Creswell on Wednesday. Okay?”
The boy only shrugs, though the anger in his eyes does not go away. Neither does the fear.
I pass into the house. Some of the inner rooms are bare, while the movers are gradually filling others with boxes and crates. I move upstairs into more empty rooms and, perhaps out of habit, drift to the ceiling. The previous owners left nothing of themselves here: no happiness, no grief, no pain. It is the best anyone can wish for in a place to stay.
Down below, the movers continue their work while the older man supervises. The boy sidles away to seek solace under the shade of a tree, shielding his eyes to glance up at this new house. Then his eyes widen.
“Hey! Hey, you!”
He runs into the house before anyone can stop him, and after trading startled looks with some of the movers, his father follows suit, confused by the boy’s excitement, his sudden animation. By the time he catches up, the boy is standing by the window, unable to explain the room’s emptiness.
“Didn’t you see her? There was someone in here!”
“I don’t see anyone, Tark,” his father says after a pause.
“It was a woman!” The boy prowls the room, then moves into the next, still hunting for a presence and finding nothing. The father follows. “She had long hair, and she was dressed all in white!”
His father places a hand on his son’s shoulder in a manner I believe is meant to offer comfort, but not belief. “It’s been a long trip. Why not take a little nap in the car? I’ll wake you up as soon as they get most of the things inside.”
A pause, then the boy nods, having little of either evidence or alternatives. They walk back outside, but rather than getting in the car, the boy remains outside by the gardens. He continues to watch the house, seeking something to prove himself right and his father wrong. But I am careful, and he sees nothing but an empty house where spirits do not wander.
But someone else watches him. Another car is parked two houses away, a white one, small compared to the many others that roam these streets. Its driver observes the boy, and I know this because I can feel his hunger reaching out like a web of invisible malice. From the direction of this small, white car, I hear sounds of weeping, and I recognize these noises all too well.
I leave the house and steal across the street. I slip into the man’s backseat and study him with the mirror that dangles over his dashboard. Unlike the Stained Shirt Man, he is clean-shaven and handsome. His suit is dark and very well-pressed. He has green eyes and brown hair. Other people might say he looks “friendly” and also “kindly” and “well-mannered.” He is smiling, but there is nothing in his eyes.
There are dead children strapped to his back.
(One girl, two girls, three.)
They fill the car with cries and lamentations. I see the familiar pieces of rope on their wrists, all affixed to the man’s forearms. But like the others, the smiling man takes no notice and continues to watch the tattooed boy.
(Four girls, five, six.)
They are blondes and redheads and brunettes. They are blue-eyed and dark-eyed and brown-eyed and green-eyed. They are pale and freckled, and dark and brown. They are six years old and eight years old and twelve years old and fifteen years old.
(Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.)
Some of these children have been tied to him for almost twenty years, others only since the month before.
(Twelve. One boy, two boys, three, four, five.)
He smiles now, this smiling man. It is how he sets his bait, how he entices. And his smile this time is for the boy with the tattoos.
I could take him
take take him take him
now. I could take his smiling, putrid little head and crush it
crush it crush
in my mouth. I could make him suffer. I could make him scream
scream scream scream SCREAM SCREAM
for me. Daylight holds no power over spirits such as me.
But I prefer the thrill of night. I prefer the same enclosed spaces in which these people do their work, where they feel themselves at their most powerful. It is a greater pleasure to kill in darker pastures, that much I know. It is not much of a vanity, but that is all that remains with me.
The Smiling Man
take him crush him
starts his car. The dead children watch me as I watch him drive away, and I know I will see him again. I quell the hungers, the quiet places, and they retreat, for now.
The boy, too, intrigues me—for the first time in as long as I can remember—and that is a long, long time. His strange tattoos intrigue me. What lies moving underneath them intrigues me. There is something inside the boy that calls and repulses. There is something strange and malevolent hiding inside him, though I know not what, or why.
There is something inside him that reminds me of home.
I want to know the language of his strange tattoos. And time is one of the few things I have left to spend.
And when the Smiling Man
take him
makes his move—as I know he will—I will be there. Waiting for him.
Until then, I can keep my own vigil.
For in this new house, there also is an attic.