Theater Macabre (10 page)

Desmond bows his head against the sudden torrent and grimaces. The inclement weather has been promised, a dismal end to the unseasonable warmth, and yet he realizes now he’d been hoping the forecasters had flubbed their lines, misplaced a tacked-on cartoon cloud or simply read their readouts wrong. Already the downpour has penetrated his tweed overcoat, trickling down the back of his neck, caressing an arc of sunburn with cold curious fingers, and clouding his spirits like ink spilled in water.

Cars slither past, their tires punching rain from the potholes, eliciting cries of outrage from sodden pedestrians on both sides of the street. Awnings whip in torment, the trees dancing a sinuous dance as a gale rises, blasting the rain into reddened, squinting faces. The light strains to remain as darker colors are injected into the sky. Rumbling. A flicker of light bleaches the day, sending transient shadows fleeing.

Desmond walks on, with a shake of his head and a palm pressed on his hat to keep it from sailing away to parts unknown.

Congratulations, Mr. James. You’ve got the job.

He tries to smile, knows he should be happy, but a smile, however small, is an ill-fitting suit he need not wear when there’s no one around to expect it. So he doesn’t, and as the wind tears at him like the hands of the blind, he thinks of how much he will hate the job, how much he dreads the torture of the First Day. It is, after all, just another job to him. Not a job he wants, but needs. Five days of mind-numbing banality for the two-day gratification his paycheck will bring. And then it will start all over again.

One more time folks, with feeling
.

Sometimes, late at night, he tries to remember when he ever held a job he even remotely liked. Sleep spares him the disappointment of drawing a blank. Work is a necessity. He needs the money and he needs to be away from the house.

Because of Vera.

His wife, who lately, just to annoy him, has taken to wearing her head the wrong way round.

*

Someone thumps a wet shoulder against his chest, and grumbles an apology that emerges as the opening strains of thunder. Desmond sighs, jarred from his thoughts, and moves on, past an elm tree that seems about to tear free of its roots and become window dressing for Jackie’s Boutique & Sauna. Carefully sidestepping the shuddering elm, he casts a look up at the sky and wonders why whatever angered deity currently stirring the sky has prohibited Desmond’s happiness all these years. His life has, at best, been a series of unremarkable and instantly forgettable events, the clearest of memories only distinguished from the clutter by their severity. Fleeting moments of contentment are gone; trauma remains. He can recall all the accidents, run-ins, mistakes, sorrow, grief, pain, hate and rage that have led him to this quiet town in search of nothing but the light, that simply sputtering candle that can prevent him from being consumed wholly by the dark. But of happiness, there is nothing but a cold empty room smelling of candle smoke, the flame pinched out by the wind of misery.

Despair has been his bedfellow for so long it is not uncommon for him to jerk out of reverie wondering if he is not his own master, if he is periodically allowed to slip out of himself because his presence is not altogether needed. The thought compounds his depression, leading to rage that has no means of escape, and so stays within him until it sinks like silt to the bottom of his brain.

A roar of thunder makes him flinch, his heart races for a moment and he hurries, ignoring the peculiar scuttling of an old lady who appears to have one leg too many as she makes her way to shelter. As she speeds past him, he hears a high wheedling sound and realizes she is singing. It is a disharmonious mangling of a vaguely familiar tune, sung by a creature with rusted wind chimes in her throat. By the time he reaches the brooding monolith of his house, it occurs to him that she might have been singing “I’m Singing in the Rain” – only in reverse.

*

The hallway is forever dark. Even in full light, the corners clutch pools of shadow to themselves and the floor is painted a concrete gray. The stained glass rectangle above the door further tempers the light, splintering it into comforting hues that do not comfort in the least.

Every day at least once, Desmond hangs his coat up on the barbed coat rack and feels as if he has hung his skin upon the brass hook. The journey down the long hallway sees him slouched, drained of will and energy, a beaten man (though not since his uncle’s death has anyone put a hand to him). But Desmond knows hands are not always the most efficient tools for torture. Sometimes words are enough.

And Vera is quite the orator.

“What are you gawking at?” she shrieks at the wall and her head spins to greet his appearance in the doorway. He wants to sag against the jamb, feels almost duty bound to do so, but the lone spark of defiance he keeps in a jar inside his head prevents it and he straightens, steels himself.

Vera’s eyes are wide and dark as coals. Her mouth is set in a sneer so familiar to Desmond he cannot recall, even in dreams, any other way in which she might ever have worn it. She is dressed in the same floral print dress as always, only today she’s wearing the imitation pearl necklace he bought when they were courting. Tonight will be bad, perhaps the worst it’s been in years. The pearls are not meant to draw his mind back to better times, but to emphasis the barber pole twist of the skin around her neck. The folds are tight and strained. Desmond imagines a touch might be enough to unravel it. And while she is glaring, her body is turned the other way, ministering to a pot of oily black stuff that smells faintly of shoe leather.

She continues to stir.

She continues to glare.

Even as thunder batters the house and the wind snuffles in the cracks, even as the foundations groan and the windows rattle, she glares, her eyes bloodshot from the cessation of oxygen to her brain.

“What a waste you are and what a waste am I now that I’m saddled with you. Why don’t you shred yourself and give us both some piece. Shut that fucking addled brain of yours down for good,” she says, her words like darts that cut through the air and embed themselves in his heart.

He wants to argue, plead his case but as always, the realization that he
has
no case, that her words only hurt because they’re true, means he can only stand and listen, and wait for her to get bored of her game.

“Stuck in Turrow with a bloody useless simp who can’t even organize himself enough to smile. Get out of my goddamn sight before I report you to The Council.”

Desmond remembers a time when such a threat would have reduced him to a blubbering mess. He also remembers a time when Vera wouldn’t have dared make such a wicked threat. Times, however, have changed. He simply shakes his head at her, folds his arms and closes his eyes. The Council. Now there was a job he might actually enjoy. A plush office, expensive brandy and cigars, the run of the town…all his, if he agreed to shred the occasional wrongdoer. But that window of opportunity had been shut so long there's dust on the panes. He’s eleven years above the required age. Besides, he’d make a better victim than an employee.

“A dumb
simp
,” Vera yells, her voice filling the kitchen, the house, competing with the thunder, which for the briefest of moments falls silent, as if chided by the malevolence in her tone. “Can’t even speak up for himself. Can’t even strive to fix his lot, to make his life better and make a paradise for his wife!”

Desmond allows the muscles in his shoulders to loosen, allows a single solitary tear to creep unseen down his cheek. Vera’s head snaps the right way round with the sound of a heel grinding broken glass. She huffs and clucks her tongue, but the thunder outside resumes bellowing; the storm inside blows out.

I still love you Vera
, he wants to say but knows he never will.

I still love you
.

If he said it, she’d only laugh, and that would kill him.

He turns to leave but movement catches his eye and halts him. A pair of scaly black fingers rise from the cooking pot and offer him a coy wave.

Vera chuckles.

*

If there is one haven in his life, it is the basement. Damp, dank and crawling with snickering, scuttling life, water trickles in a constant stream down the walls. There is a permanent fog of cobwebs hanging from between the joists. Jars of every size, filled with liquid mysteries, stock sagging shelves. The air is thick and unpleasant.

But for once, the shadowy rustlings and the miasmic aura do not bother him, for Desmond has found what might be, if not paradise, then at least a reprieve, for his wife.

He knows her caustic words don't mean anything. She would not set The Council on him. They could take care of him quickly and efficiently and he has often considered calling them to end his woes, but that wouldn’t work. The Council is the only place he does not view as a crumbling tower of hopelessness. The twelve story metal building is a symbol of ambition. Every child who steps forth from school fresh with knowledge only has to glance across the road at that citadel gleaming in the light, to know where success lies. Every child except Desmond, who has missed every boat, every train, every conceivable route to happiness that ever presented itself as an attainable goal. He is an anomaly, a weak link in a titanium chain. He does not belong and society knows it, is perhaps even now priming itself to grind him underfoot. No, his place is not here and the realization of that fact has come much too late to make a difference. But when he goes, he will fade out with that silver tower in his mind’s eye and wonder, as he so often does, what might have been.

There is an old chair set in a puddle next to a crumbling walnut desk. It is here Desmond sits, and from the top drawer of the desk, he removes three objects. The first is a yellowing sheet of notepaper. The second, a pen. The third is a scalpel, tinged with rust, but good enough to suit his purpose.

“Food!” Vera hollers from the kitchen and stomps across the floor. Dust rains down. Thunder roars.

I love you
, Desmond tells her in silence as tears drip from his eyes. He wonders if on any level she knows how he feels.

Shadows cackle in the corner.

He sits forward, and raises his handless arms to keep the paper steady.

I love you, Vera. I always have
.

He opens his mouth and lets the curled up arm inside unfold. Teeth are knocked free as it stretches, testing the air with saliva-slicked fingers, its bicep dislocating Desmond’s jaw as first it takes care of the note, then promptly snatches the scalpel and jerks around to take care of the author.

And finally,
finally
, Desmond sees the light.

And smiles around his flailing tongue as The Council doors yawn open.

Not Quite Ghosts

God was scraping His heels against the carpet of the sky as Angela turned up the lapels of her raincoat and bowed her head against the promise of rain. The promise quickly became a threat as His heel punched through the steel-colored clouds and a torrent of rain hissed down on top of the unsuspecting and woefully unprepared people waiting at the Lincoln Street bus stop.

Angela felt no satisfaction that she’d been right in predicting the rain or that the strange looks she’d earned from the shirtless teenagers milling around the stop dressed in loose shorts were now pointed skyward. It was July and she was sweating beneath the thick folds of her raincoat, but she’d been right. As usual.

An old man grabbed her elbow, not forcefully but hard enough for her to gasp in surprise as she turned to face him, her lime-green eyes meeting his milky blue ones. He was stooped as if already boarding the bus, one gnarled hand absently massaging his lower back, the other slipping from Angela’s arm now that he’d caught her attention.

Her smile flickered on but the weight of it could not be sustained by the absence of sincerity. “Yes?”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, looking genuinely apologetic. “How did you know?”

“About the rain?” She shrugged.

He gave no indication that he had seen or heard. “How did you know it was coming?”

She stared at him for a moment and wondered if she should tell him. Perhaps it would be best not to. “I don’t know,” she lied and turned away.

The bus hissed and snorted its way to a halt, the door flapping open with a labored wheeze.

She was sorry for the lie and could sense him juggling with indecision at her back, wondering whether or not to accept her brusque termination of their exchange.

Eventually she boarded the bus, his eyes heavy on the back of her neck, and she knew he recognized her for what she was. Hoping he wouldn’t choose to sit beside her when she found a seat, she ducked her head and tried to let the grumbling of the passengers, the chink and clack of the driver’s ticket machine, and the drumming of the rain on the roof of the bus occupy her mind.

She took a seat at the back and kept her head low, her dark, sopping hair hanging in her face.

After a few minutes the bus swung away from the stop and plunged like a steel leviathan into traffic.

A peek over the headrest in front of her showed no sign of the old man anywhere. She sighed and rubbed her eyes.

The window rattled beside her as the rain tapped invisible fingers against the glass.

She had known there would be rain.

Just as she had known the old man would attempt to talk to her.

And that he was one of the dead ones.

Charlotte, what have you done?

*

Brett Reed made a ragged ball out of his saturated sweatshirt and tossed it into the waiting mouth of the dryer. He was still wondering where the hell the rain had come from, forcing the cancellation of the tennis lesson he was due to teach, when the little girl stepped out of the washing machine, next to where he had been about to poke the dryer into action.