JEFFREY FORD
They each decided, separately, that they wouldn’t discuss it that night. The autumn breeze sounded in the tree outside the open kitchen window and traveled all through the second-story apartment of the old Victorian house. It twirled the hanging plant over the sink, flapped the ancient magazine photo of Veronica Lake tacked to his office door, spun the clown mobile in the empty bedroom, and, beneath it, set the wicker rocker to life. In their bedroom it tilted the fabric shade of the antique floor lamp that stood in the corner by the front window. Allison looked at the reflection of them lying beneath the covers in the mirror set into the top of the armoire while Bill looked at their reflection in the glass of the hand-colored print, “Moon Over Miami,” that hung on the wall above her. The huge gray cat, Mama, her belly skimming the floor, padded quietly into the room and snuck through the partially open door of the armoire.
Bill rolled over to face Allison and ran his hand softly down the length of her arm. “Today, while I was writing,” he said, “I heard, coming up through the grate beneath my desk, Tana, getting yelled at by her mother.”
“Demon seed?” said Allison.
He laughed quietly. “Yeah.” He stopped rubbing her arm. “I got out of my chair, got down on the floor, and turned my ear to the grate.”
She smiled.
“So the mom’s telling Tana, ‘You’ll listen to me, I’m the mother. I’m in charge and you’ll do what I say.’ Then there was a pause, and I hear this voice. Man, this was like no kid’s voice, but it was Tana, and she says, ‘No, Mommy, I’m in charge and you will listen to me.’”
“Get outa here,” Allison said and pushed him gently in the chest.
“God’s honest truth. So then Cindy makes a feeble attempt to get back in power. I’m the Mommy,’ she yells, but I could tell she meant to say it with more force, and it came out cracked and weak. And then there’s a pause, and Tana comes back with, ‘You’re wrong, Mommy. I am in charge and you will listen to me.’”
“Creep show,” Allison said.
“It got really quiet then, so I put my ear down closer. My head was on the damn floor. That’s when I heard Cindy weeping.”
Allison gave a shiver, half fake, and handed Bill one of her pillows. He put it behind his head with the rest of his stack. “Did I tell you what Phil told me?” she said.
“No,” he said.
“He told me that when he’s walking down the street and he sees her on one side of the road, he crosses over to the opposite side.”
“I don’t blame him,” he said, laughing.
“He told you about the dog, right?” she said, pulling the covers up over her shoulder.
Bill shook his head.
“He said the people who live in the apartment on the second floor next-door—the young guy with the limp and his wife, Rhoda—they used to have a beagle that they kept on their porch all day while they were at work.”
“Over here,” he said and pointed at the wall.
“Yeah. They gave it water and food, the whole thing, and had a long leash attached to its collar. Anyway, one day Phil’s walking down to the Busy Bee to get coffee and cigarettes and he sees Tana standing under the porch, looking up at the dog. She was talking to it. Phil said that the dog was getting worked up, so he told Tana to leave it alone. She shot him a ‘don’t fuck with me’ stare. He was worried how it might look, him talking to the kid, so he went on his way. That afternoon the dog was discovered strangled, hanging by the leash off the second-story porch.”
“He never told me that. Shit. And come to think about it, I never told you this.… I was sitting in my office just the other day, writing, and all of a sudden I feel something on my back, like it’s tingling. I turn around, and there she is, standing in the doorway to the office, holding Mama like a baby doll, just staring at me. I jumped out of my chair, and I said, like, ‘I didn’t hear you knock.’ I was a little scared, actually, so I asked her if she wanted a cookie. At first she didn’t say anything, but just looked at me with that … if I was writing a story about her I’d describe her face as dour—an old lady face minus the wrinkles.… Then, get this, she says in that low, flat voice, ‘Do you Lambada?’”
“What the fuck?” Allison said and laughed. “She didn’t say that.” -
“No,” he said, “that’s what she said, she asked me if I Lambada. What the hell is it anyway? I told her no, and then she turned and split.”
“Lambada, I think …” she said and broke out laughing again, “I think it’s some kind of South American Dance.”
“What would have happened if I said yes?” he asked.
“Lambada,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“Phil’s got the right strategy with her,” he said.
“But I don’t like her coming up here in the middle of the day uninvited,” said Allison.
“I’ll have to start locking the door after you go to work,” said Bill.
“This place … there’s something very … I don’t know.” She sighed. “Like you ever lean against a wall? It kind of gives like flesh,” she said.
“That’s just the lathing … it’s separating away from the Sheetrock cause the place is so old. I know what you mean, though, with that egg shell smoothness and the pliancy when you touch it—spongy-weird.”
“I’m talking there’s a sinister factor to this place. The oriental carpets, the lion’s paw tub, the old heavy furniture—the gravity of the past that was here when we moved in. I can’t put my finger on it. At first I thought it was quaint, but then I realized it didn’t stop there.”
“Like melancholy?” he asked.
“Yeah, exactly—a sadness.”
“Just think about it. You’ve got Corky and Cindy down there, hitting the sauce and each other almost every night. They must have had to buy a whole new set of dishes after last weekend. Then you got the kid … nuff said there. What about next door, over here on this side, the guy who washes his underwear on the fucking clothesline with the hose? That guy’s also classically deranged.”
“I forgot about him,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “let’s not forget about him. I watch him from the kitchen window. I can see right down through the tree branches and across the yard into his dining room. He sits there every night for hours, reading that big fat book.”
“I’ve seen him down there,” she said. “Sometimes when I wake-up at three A.M. and go into the kitchen for a glass of water, I notice him down there reading. Is it the Bible?”
“Could be the fucking phone book for all I know.”
“Cindy told me that when they got Tana that yippie little dog … Shotzy, Potzy … whatever, the kid was walking on that side of the house over by the old guy’s property, and he came out his back door, and yelled at her, ‘If I find your dog in my yard, I’ll kill it.’ Now, I know Tana’s demon seed and all, but she’s still a little kid.… Cindy didn’t tell Corky because she was afraid he’d cork off and kick the crap out of the old guy.”
“What, instead of her for once? Hey, you never know, maybe the old man’s just trying to protect himself from Tana’s … animal magic.” said Bill. “You know, Cindy swears the kid brought a dead bird back to life. She just kind of slips that in in the middle of a ‘hey, the weather’s nice’ kind of conversation.”
“Yeah, I’ve caught that tale,” said Allison. There was a pause. “But do you get my overall point here?” She opened her hands to illustrate the broadness of the concept. “Like we’re talking some kind of hovering, negative funk.”
“Amorphous and pungent,” he said.
“I’ve felt it ever since the first week we moved in here,” she said.
“Does it have anything to do with the old woman who answered the door with her pants around her ankles?”
“Olive Harker?” she said, “Corky’s illustrious mom?”
“Remember, Olive hadda get shipped out for us to move in. Maybe she cursed the joint … you, know, put the Lambada on it.”
“It wasn’t her so much,” said Allison. “I first felt it the day the cat pissed in the sugar bowl.”
He stopped rubbing her forehead. “Right in front of me—between bites of French toast,” he said. “That cat sucks.”
“Don’t talk about Mama that way,” she said.
“It baahhhs like a lamb and eats flies. I hate it,” he said.
“She’s good. Three whole weeks gone and she still came back, didn’t she? You shouldn’t have thrown her out.”
“I didn’t throw her, I drop-kicked her. She made a perfect arc, right over the back fence. But the question is, or at least the point is, if I follow you, is how strange is it that she pissed right in the sugar bowl—jumped up on the table, made a beeline for it, parked right over it, and pissed like there was no tomorrow?”
“That’s what I’m getting at,” said Allison. “It fulfills no evolutionary need. It’s just grim.”
“Maybe it’s us,” he said. “Maybe we’re haunting ourselves.”
“I saw Corky digging a big hole out in the yard the other day,” she said. “His back’s full of ink—an angel being torn apart by demons.… I was more interested in the hole he was digging ’cause I haven’t heard any yipping out of Potzy for a few days.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m ready for him.”
“How?” she asked.
“Last Thursday, when I went out garbage-picking and found Veronica’s picture, I brought back a busted-off rake handle. I wound duct tape around one end for a grip. It’s in the kitchen behind the door for when Corky gets shit-faced and starts up the stairs. Then I’m gonna grab that thing and beat his ass.”
“Hey, do you remember that guy Keith back in college?” she asked.
“McCurly, yeah,” he said. “He did the apple dance. What made you think of him?”
She nodded. “Every time he flapped his arms the apple rolled off his head, remember?”
“He danced to Steve Miller’s ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’” Bill said. “What a fuckin’ fruitcake. I remember Oshea telling me that he ended up working for the government.”
“Well, remember that time he was telling us he was reading The Amityville Horror?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“McCurly said that one of the pieces of proof that the author used in the book to nail down his case that the house was really haunted was that they found an evil shit in the toilet bowl. Remember that?”
“Yeah.”
“You said to him, ‘What do you mean by an evil shit?’ And McCurley looked like he didn’t get your question.”
“But what he eventually said was, ‘It was heinous.’ I asked him if he could explain that and he said, ‘Really gross.’”
They laughed.
She touched his face as if to make him quiet, and said, “That’s the point. We paint the unknown with the Devil’s shit to make it make sense.”
“Heavy,” said Bill. A few seconds passed in silence.
“Right? …” she said.
“That Amityville House was only like two towns over from where I grew up,” he told her. “New people were in there and it was all fixed up. I’d go out drinking with my friends all night. You know, the Callahans, and Wolfy, and Angelo, and Benny the Bear, and at the end of the night we’d have these cases of empty beer bottles in the car. So around that time the movie of the Amityville Horror came out. We went to see it and laughed our asses off—come on, Brolin? Steiger we’re talking. One of the things that cracked us up big time was the voice saying, ‘Get out. For god’s sake get the hell out.’ I don’t want to get into it now but Steiger and the flies … baby, well worth the price of admission. So we decided we’re gonna drive to the Amityville Horror House and scream, ‘Get the hell out,’ and throw our empties on the lawn.”
“That’s retarded,” she said.
“We did it, but then we kept doing it, and not just to the Amityville Horror House. Every time we did it, I’d crack like hell. It was so fucking stupid it made me laugh. Plus we were high as kites. We did it to people we knew and didn’t know and we did it a lot to the high school coaches we’d had for different sports. There was this one guy, though, we did it to the most—Coach Pinhead. Crew cut, face as smooth as an ass, goggly eyes, and his favorite joke was to say “How Long is a Chinaman.” He was a soccer coach, a real douche bag, but we swung by his house every weekend night for like three months, dropped the empties and yelled ‘Pinhead!!!’ before peeling out on his lawn. We called the whole thing a ‘Piercing Pinhead.’”
“Could you imagine how pissed off you’d be today if some kids did that to you,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, “I know. But get this. I was talking to Mike Callahan about five years later. When he was working selling furniture and married to that rich girl. I saw him at my mother’s funeral. He told me that he found out later on that Pinhead died of pancreatic cancer. All that time we were doing the Piercing Pinheads, screaming in the middle of the night outside his house, tormenting him, the poor guy was in there, in his bedroom, dying by inches.”
“That’s haunted,” said Allison.
“Tell me about it,” he said and then rolled closer to kiss her.
They kissed and then lay quiet, both listening to the sound of the leaves blowing outside. She began to doze off, but before her eyes closed all the way, she said, “Who’s getting the light?”
“You,” said Bill.
“Come on,” she said, “I’ve got an early shift tomorrow.”
“Come on? I’ve gotten the damn light every night for the past two weeks.”
“That’s ’cause it’s your job,” she said.
“Fuck that,” he said but started to get up. Just then the light went out.
She opened her eyes slightly, grinning. “Sometimes it pays to be haunted,” she said.
Bill looked around the darkened room and said, as if to everywhere at once, “Thank you.”
The light blinked on and then off.
“Maybe the bulb’s loose,” he said.
The light blinked repeatedly on and off and then died again.
“That’s freaky,” she said, but freaky wasn’t going to stop her from falling asleep. Her eyes slowly closed and before he could kiss her again on the forehead, she was lightly snoring.
Bill lay there in the dark, wide awake, thinking about their conversation and about the lamp. He thought about ghosts in Miami, beneath swaying palm trees, doing the Lambada by moonlight. Finally, he whispered, “Light, are you really haunted?”
Nothing.
A long time passed, and then he asked, “Are you Olive?”
The light stayed off.
Just darkness.
“Are you Tana?” he said. He waited for a sign, but nothing. Eventually he closed his eyes and thought about work. He worked at Nescron, a book store housed in the bottom floor of a block-long, four-story warehouse—timbers and stone—built in the 1800s. All used books. The owner, Stan, had started, decades earlier, in the scrap paper business and over time had amassed tons of old books. The upper three floors of the warehouse were packed with unopened boxes and crates from everywhere in the world. Bill’s job was to crawl in amid the piles of boxes, slit them open, and mine their cargo, picking out volumes for the Literature section in the store downstairs. Days would pass at work and he’d see no one. He’d penetrated so deeply into the morass of the third floor that sometimes he’d get scared, having the sanie feeling he’d had when he and Allison had gone to Montana three months earlier to recuperate and they were way up in the mountains and came upon a freshly killed and half-eaten antelope beside a water hole. Amidst the piles of books, he felt for the second time in his life that he was really “out there.”
“I expect some day to find a pine box up on the third floor holding the corpse of Henry Miller,” he’d told Allison at dinner one night.
“Who’s Henry Miller?” she’d asked.
He’d found troves of classics and first editions and even signed volumes for the store down below, and Stan had praised his efforts at excavating the upper floors. As the months went on, Bill was making a neat little stack of goodies for himself, planning to shove them in a paper sack and spirit them home with him when he closed up some Monday night. An early edition of Longfellow’s translation of Dante; an actual illuminated manuscript with gold leaf; a signed, first edition of Call of the Wild; an 1885 edition of The Scarlet Letter, were just some of the treasures.
Recently at work he’d begun to get an odd feeling when he was deep within the wilderness of books, not the usual fear of loneliness, but the opposite, that he was not alone. Twice in the last week, he’d thought he’d heard whispering, and once, the sudden quiet tumult of a distant avalanche of books. He’d asked down below in the store if anyone else was working the third floor, and he was told that he was the only one. Then, only the previous day, he couldn’t locate his cache of hoarded books. It was possible that he was disoriented, but in the very spot he’d thought they’d be, he instead found one tall slim volume. It was a book of fairy tales illustrated by an artist named Segur. The animals depicted in the illustrations walked upright with personality, and the children, in powder-blue snowscapes surrounded by Christmas mice, were pale, staring zombies. The colors were odd, slightly washed out, and the sizes of the creatures and people were haphazard.
Without realizing it, Bill fell asleep and his thoughts of work melted into a dream of the writer Henry Miller. He woke suddenly a little while later to the sound of Allison’s voice, the room still in darkness. “Bill,” she said again and pushed his shoulder, “you awake?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I had a dream,” said Allison. “Oh my god …”
“Sounds like a good one,” he said.
“Maybe, maybe,” she said.
He could tell she was waiting for him to ask what it was about. Finally he asked her, “So what happened?”
She drew close to him and he put his arm around her. She whispered, “Lothianne.”
“Lothianne?” said Bill.
“A woman with three arms,” said Allison. “She had an arm coming out of the upper part of her back, and the hand on it had two thumbs instead of a pinky and a thumb, so it wouldn’t be either righty or lefty. The elbow only bent up and down, not side to side.”
“Yow,” said Bill.
“Her complexion was light blue, and her hair was dark and wild, but not long. And she wore this dress with an extra arm hole in the back. This dress was plain, like something out of the Dust Bowl, gray, and reached to the ankles, and I remembered my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Donnelly, the mean old bitch, having worn the exact one back in grade school when we spent a whole year reading The Last Days of Pompeii.”
“Did the three-arm woman look like your teacher?” asked Bill.
“No, but she was stupid and mean like her. She had a dour face, familiar and frightening. Anyway, Lothianne wandered the woods with a pet jay that flew above her and sometimes perched in that tangled hair. I think she might have been a cannibal. She lived underground in like a woman-size rabbit warren.”
“Charming,” he said.
“I was a little girl and my sister and I were running hard toward this house in the distance, away from the woods, just in front of a wave of nighttime. I knew we had to reach the house before the darkness swept over us. The blue jay swooped down and, as I tried to catch my breath, it spit into my mouth. It tasted like fire and spread to my arms and legs. My running went dream slow, my legs dream heavy. My sister screamed toward the house. Then, like a rusty engine, I seized altogether and fell over.”
“You know, in China, they eat Bird Spit Soup …” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. “The next thing I know, I come to and Lothianne and me are on a raft, in a swiftly moving stream, tethered to a giant willow tree that’s growing right in the middle of the flow. Lothianne has a lantern in one hand, and in the other she’s holding the end of a long vine that’s tied in a noose around my neck. The moon’s out, shining through the willow whips and reflecting off the running water, and I’m so scared.
“She says, ‘Time to practice drowning’ and kicks me in the back. I fall into the water. Under the surface I’m looking up and the moonlight allows me to see the stones and plants around me. There are speckled fish swimming by. Just before I’m out of air, she reels me in. This happens three times, and on the last time, when she reels me in, she vanishes, and I’m flying above the stream and surrounding hills and woods, and I’m watching things growing—huge plants like asparagus, sprouting leaves and twining and twirling and growing in the moonlight. Even in night, it was so perfectly clear.”
“Jeez,” said Bill.
Allison was silent for a while. Eventually she propped herself up on her elbow and said, “It was frightening but it struck me as a ‘creative’ dream ’cause of the end.”
“A three-armed woman,” said Bill. “Rembrandt once did an etching of a three-armed woman having sex with a guy.”
“I was wondering if the noose around my neck was symbolic of an umbilical cord.…”
He stared at her. “Why?” he finally said.
She was about to answer but the bedroom light blinked on and off, on and off, on and off, without stopping, like a strobe light, and from somewhere or everywhere in the room came the sound of low moaning.
Bill threw the covers off, sat straight up, and said, “What the fuck?”
Allison, wide-eyed, her glance darting here and there, said, “Bill …”
The light show finally ended in darkness, but the sound grew louder, more strange, like a high-pitched growling that seemed to make the glass of the windows vibrate. She grabbed his shoulder and pointed to the armoire. He turned, and as he did, Mama the cat came bursting out of the standing closet, the door swinging wildly. She screeched and spun in incredibly fast circles on the rug next to the bed.
“Jesus Christ,” yelled Bill, and lifted his feet, afraid the cat might claw him. “Get the fuck outta here!” he yelled at it.
Mama took off out of the bedroom, still screeching. Allison jumped out of the bed and took off after the cat. Bill cautiously brought up the rear. They found Mama in the bathroom, on the floor next to the lion paw tub, writhing.
“Look,” said Bill, peering over Allison’s shoulder, “she’s attacking her own ass. What the hell …”
“Oh, man,” said Allison. “Check it out.” She pointed as Mama pulled this long furry lump out of herself with her teeth.”
“That’s it for me,” he said, backing away from the bathroom doorway.
“Bill, here comes another. It’s alive.”
“Alive?” he said, sitting down on a chair in the kitchen. “I thought it was a mohair turd.”
“No, you ass, she’s having a kitten. I never realized she was pregnant. Must be from the time you kicked her out.”
Bill sat there staring at Allison’s figure illuminated by the bulb she’d switched on in the bathroom.
“This is amazing, you should come see it,” she called over her shoulder to him.
“I’ll pass,” he said. He turned then and looked through the open kitchen window, down across the yard toward the old man’s house. For the first time he could remember, his neighbor wasn’t there, reading the big book. The usual rectangle of light was now a dark empty space.
Later, he found Allison sitting in the wicker rocker, beneath the clown mobile, in the otherwise empty bedroom. The light was on, and she rocked, slowly, a rolled up towel cradled in her arms. “Come see,” she said to him, smiling. “The first was stillborn, and this is the only other one, but it lived. It’s a little girl.”
He didn’t want to, but she seemed so pleased. He took a step closer. She pulled back a corner of the towel, and there was a small, wet face with blue eyes.
“We have to think of a name,” she said.