STEVE RASNIC TEM’S RECENT stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Black Wings II and the Ellen Datlow anthology Blood & Other Cravings. His new novel, Deadfall Hotel, will be published by Solaris Books in early 2012, while New Pulp Press will be bringing out a collection of his noir short stories, Ugly Behavior, later the same year.
“As for the following story,” reveals the author, “it began with a dreadful image at the end of a dream. I couldn’t remember the other details of that dream, but I was determined to find out where that image might have come from.”
BEFORE HE MET MAGGIE, he thought he understood the difference between sense and nonsense. By the end, and he could smell it coming – redolent of fish and sweaty sheets – he could hardly tell the difference between breath and flesh.
They had visited three, four hundred houses for sale. They had driven down every street in the county, every nameless lane. They had done this in late October, with a layer of ice-capped snow on the ground, the wind low but steady enough to scour the back of your throat until you were made inarticulate.
Wayne did not complain, but it was painful, creeping along, enduring the stares of suspicious neighbours, as in the shaded lanes the ice cracked and exploded beneath his tyres. It might have been better if he’d had any idea what she was looking for, but she did not share her criteria. Wayne supposed that was what artists were like. But it exhausted the people who loved them.
In most cases a relatively slow drive-by was sufficient: the house would apparently be in the wrong architectural style, or too tall, or too wide. He wasn’t permitted to say anything – he couldn’t even hum while he was driving. And now and then she would insist that they step inside, or walk around, or lie on the floor and gaze at the ceiling. Wayne had been unemployed two years, but he did have his real estate license – for once that made him feel useful.
Wayne didn’t enjoy any of it. He especially didn’t enjoy lying on those dusty floors, looking into those crusty ceilings, inviting dust into his eyes, dust into his mouth, where it tasted aspirin bitter, like all that was left by the end of the day, like the end of life itself.
He had no idea why they were doing it, except Maggie said it was something she needed to do before she could choose the right house. And as much as she annoyed and infuriated him, Wayne adored Maggie, and would do anything she asked.
“This is the one,” she said. “Finally, this is the one. I can feel it.”
The house was in worse shape than most of the others. Unpainted grey boards pushed through tatters of off-white colour. Inside, the walls were thin as paper. Wayne imagined he could see the colours of the next room bleeding through.
“If you dropped something you’d hear it in every room of the house.” As if on cue, vague, hesitant sounds travelled from the other end of the house, or farther.
Maggie hadn’t heard, or ignored them. “But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Nothing can ever sneak up on you.”
The fact that something sneaking up was even a consideration appalled him. “It smells funny in here,” he said. “Are you sure you can live in a place that smells funny?”
“They make paint with chemicals that kill the odour.”
And that was that. She’d made up her mind. He supposed she didn’t care how the place smelled. For him it was as if he’d crawled inside a loaf of old, damp bread. The rich stink filled the nose and spilled over into the mouth. He imagined a sponginess in the wood open to rot, mould, mildew.
Sun glare flashed through the window glass. A suggestion of double-exposed imagery floated across the wall. But when he shifted his head slightly it had gone. Maggie had chosen, and he had to make the best of it. It was her money.
The day after they closed, Wayne had their bedroom ready. By evening they had the appliances arranged in a rudimentary kitchen. He spent a difficult weekend stocking Maggie’s new studio with paints, canvases, and a myriad other supplies.
In her studio he watched as she put the finishing touches on a new painting. Maggie never seemed to mind his visits to her workplace – often she invited him. It didn’t seem to matter how unfinished a piece might be.
But then she always acted as if he wasn’t there. Her focus could be disturbing, the way she stared at the canvas, aggressively applying paint, not even bothering to check her pigments, holding her breath, unable to do anything else until the canvas filled with colour.
It was one of her house paintings. Almost all of her paintings were of houses, at least as long as he’d known her. Those paintings had proved surprisingly popular in the galleries – they were the reason they could afford to buy this house, and pay for everything else. “They work because the right house will remind us of other houses important in our lives,” she explained. “They resonate. You look at certain houses, and you can just imagine the lives of the people inside, trapped by those walls, or lovingly embraced. Their experience is also our own.”
When Maggie painted it was always an attack upon the canvas. She thickened the acrylic paint until it was the consistency of brilliantly coloured liquid clay. She shovelled the colour onto the surface, then worked quickly to create vegetation, planks, timbers, brick, doors, windows, roofs, sky. He was always surprised when her fury suddenly turned a chaos of swirling thick colour into something recognisable.
But what was even more surprising was that something extraordinarily appealing resulted from this process. These were the prettiest, most intensely welcoming houses he’d ever seen.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
The painting was like all the others, but he could sense subtle differences. “The lines around the door, the porch roof, that window, it’s like this house, isn’t it?”
“In better days, yes. Or maybe the way it will be, after we finish fixing it up.”
“So this place is the model you were looking for?”
“Maybe I’ve been painting it since the beginning, the spaces, the lines. It’s like I was trying to recall it.”
“Then you’ve been here before?”
“No – I’m sure I haven’t.”
“Maybe with your dad?” It was a risk – her father had always been a sore point.
“No – I don’t think so. The house he moved into after the divorce may have been similar. I stayed there summers until I graduated from high school, a few years before his death.”
“It would have helped if I’d known what we were looking for.”
“I couldn’t have put it into words before now. I’m a picture person, not a word person. I had to see it, be inside it, and then start painting it. That’s the way I’ve always found out things about myself. I’ve never been here, Wayne, but maybe someone like me lived here, or at least nearby. Someone I’m in sympathy with.”
“So – living with your dad, that was hard?”
She nodded silently, then the tears began to drop. He started toward her but she held up her hand. “Sorry. I don’t know why I get like this. It was a sad time, but you know how kids are. You can’t think of much outside yourself. I’m not aware of hating that house, but I don’t remember ever actually being in it. I remember saying goodbye to my mom, and starting out on this long bus trip, but I can’t remember ever arriving, living with my dad, or anything about his house. I do remember telling my mother I could never go back, and my mother telling me I had to go back.”
He listened, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the new canvas. There was an out-of-place shadow peeking out of the upstairs front window: faded, sepia-coloured, uninvited.
Maggie worked late into the evening. Early the next morning Wayne left the house so as not to disturb her sleep. It was cold for working outdoors, but he could at least clear some of the dead vegetation out of the back yard.
He removed a large quantity of dead brush before he could see the ground. And even after he’d got rid of the taller plants he’d get the occasional slap, the random clawing from some unseen branch or stalk, like an untrimmed fingernail tracing the skin. Nothing terribly serious, but enough to well the blood.
A blurred shadow loomed beyond the last sweep of netted branches. With his sleeve he brushed a gritty paste of chaff and blood from his face. “Maggie? You’re up?” But when his vision cleared no one was there. He exhaled in exasperation. The fogged air hung suspended, as if poised.
As he removed dead flowers, the stray remains of potatoes, an onion or two, he began finding ash spread under everything, and bits of foundation from an old wall. An impatient weight crouched nearby, waiting for him to look up, which he eventually did, and found nothing. That was when he heard Maggie yelling from inside the house.
She was on her hands and knees in her studio. He dropped beside her and laid one hand gently on her back. “What happened?”
She shook her head, ran a finger up and down one of the wide gaps between the floor planks. Extensive sections of the ceiling below were missing, so that he could see most of the living room on the first floor.
“I don’t know what time I got to bed last night, but when I woke up I was anxious to get back to the painting. Then as I was picking up the brush I smelled something – I don’t know – smoky, but terribly sour as well, like overpowering body odour. I felt threatened, as if the stench might smother me. I looked down, and there was this person standing under me. His clothes were dark, dripping and greasy. And then he shifted, and he was looking at me. Two white, shiny spots staring up at me, but Wayne, no pupils.”
It took him minutes to check the house and yard. He rushed in to tell her he’d found nothing. She was still sitting on the floor, shaking. “You say you just woke up. It was probably just a shadow, the light confusing you.”
She shook her head. Then Wayne noticed the new painting. Despite the obscuring strokes of shadow and translucent mist it was still recognisably the same house, but done in a much darker colour palette: greys, burnt umber, deep purple, shades of black and the evening blues. Deepest night. Deepest dream.
“I probably won’t be able to sell my usual clients this one.”
“Unwelcoming is the word, I guess.”
“It terrifies me.”
“Then stop working on it.”
“I really don’t think I can paint anything else until I can finish this one.”
It was powerful. A series of vaguely realised trees led you to the front porch, caked in soot, deteriorating under the assault of some oily disease. A gauze of fog hung from the porch roof. But something more: a blurred presence seemed to be arriving out of the darkness from the back of the porch.
“I don’t know why we came here.”
Wayne grabbed her hand. “It’s like you said, houses and people resonate. You’re here because of someone who lived here before. You’re here because of whatever happened to them.”
Every evening Maggie worked on the new painting into the early morning hours. Wayne had never known her to take so long with an individual work – usually she finished them in a couple of days. But she revisited the same areas of canvas again and again, applying additional thin layers of sombre colour, constantly revising lines and shades as she apparently grew closer to her vision.
Each morning when Wayne got up he checked the painting: the blurred figure slightly more resolved, its position slightly shifted on the porch, as if it were pacing. After a few more nights it had left the porch, and was making its way up the sidewalk.
Wayne moved forward on repairs to the house and yard, although concerns over Maggie slowed him. He put a ceiling up in the living room, hoping it might comfort her that she no longer had that god’s-eye glimpse into their downstairs. The backyard didn’t look so much like a refuse pile anymore. The uncovered foundation proved to extend to all points in the yard – the building it once supported the size of a full house. He also uncovered bits of an old flagstone walk leading back to the alley that ran behind the long row of neighbouring houses.
A night came that Maggie collapsed early, and for once he was the late one up, reading, listening.
At first he thought the breathing he heard might be his own – the book, about secrets and lies and misunderstood identities, had made him tense. But when he put it down and laid his hand on his chest, he realised the rapid panting was more distant – somewhere down the hall and up the stairs. As he made that journey the panting grew louder, and the loudness of it made him think of a dog, the way a dog breathes with his entire body, especially when in pain, heaving and exhaling, unlike people who tend to breathe shallowly from their chests.
The pale little blonde girl lay with her back to him across two steps near the top of the stairs. Her body heaved like an injured dog’s. Shadows gathered along her spine: hand-shaped bruises, ending in a crown of yellow curls streaked with dark blood.
Something burned his nostrils – an acrid stench of urine. But he could find no signs of a spreading stain beneath her.
He wanted to say something, but was afraid. And he dared not touch that tender, panting shape. Suddenly coughing violently, she faded into deep shadow, then lit up again with each new intake of breath. What could he do for her? Spying on her in her old distress was some kind of violation, so he slowly crept backwards down the stairs. At the last moment her head jerked up, staring at the door at the top of the stairs. Her body started to slide toward him as she made ready her escape, but he turned and made his way downstairs and to bed.
“Wayne! Wayne, I want to leave!” He awakened with Maggie’s face a collapsed moon hanging over him, her fingers clawing his shoulder. “Now! We have to leave! Please, Wayne.”
“Of course.” He jerked himself from bed, dragging at his pants. “Just let me get a bag.”
“No!” she screamed. Shocked, he stumbled backwards onto the bed. “We have to leave! We have to get into the car! Please!”
“Okay, honey. I’m getting my clothes on right now.”
She was unsteady on her feet. They stumbled into the hall. Then she cried, “Wait! Wait right here so I’ll know where you are.” Then she raced away.
Wayne was just outside her open studio door. In the painting the shadow-wrapped figure was almost to the end of the sidewalk, ready to step out of the canvas. The floppy hat was pulled down over his face. That’s his house in the yard. That was his poor child on the stairs. They’re why we’re here.
“Ready! Let’s go, Wayne!” She carried a pillow and blanket under one arm, a butcher knife raised in her other hand. He hurried over, pushed down the arm with the knife. “I need the knife! I have to protect myself!” They started down.
She insisted on sitting in the back seat, the pillow in her lap, the blanket over her, the knife ready in her hand. Wayne didn’t ask where they were going, just pulled away from the curb.
He knew immediately that things had changed. Roads and houses, fences and fields, rearranged. When he got half-way down their street it ended in a left-hand turn, with nothing ahead where streets used to be but a hayfield studded in bales. He didn’t know what else to do but follow the turn.
After a short distance he had to turn again. The road narrowed, the pavement deteriorated. Soon they were on a dirt road, and headed back in the direction of the house. Maggie stared out the window intently.
She must have realised about the same time he did that they were actually in the alley that ran behind their house. But it was dirt now, and the houses faced it. She began rocking the pillow in her lap, making soft soothing sounds. “Did you see the little girl, Wayne? Did you see her? She was just like I used to be. We have to tell someone!”
Before they reached their own house, he realised something large was blocking their view of it. Then he understood the buried foundation had suddenly grown an old dilapidated house.
Maggie started wailing when they saw the hulking dark figure by the edge of the road. Their headlights caught a glimpse of an old see-saw, the pale children teetering there, wide eyes reflecting like cats’.
“Oh, Wayne we have to tell, we have to tell! That poor little girl!”
“We will, honey, we will,” he promised, although there was no one left alive to tell.
When the man began lifting his face out from under that floppy brim Maggie was screaming so loudly Wayne couldn’t think, and when they’d finally driven past, and made the next turn that would drag them around that house again, Wayne couldn’t imagine how they would ever get off that road.