Theater Macabre (12 page)

—stood propped against the wall.

I’m not home not home not home. I’ve come through the mirror to join the dead but walking, angry hungry dead...

She tried to weep, but the tears recoiled from her scorched flesh.

She tried to scream, but the flames she’d never seen had cauterized her throat.

So in her mind, she screamed and screamed, and begged and cried. And after a while, she began to ascend the stairs.

There’s no Heaven up here. No Heaven at all. Only death and hunger. And I can feel it all...

She reached the top of the stairs and pushed the door open fully. The light to which her hope had drawn her was daylight.

Daylight. Charlotte’s house. She used Daddy’s mirror, Daddy’s doorway...

Outside, pale shapes shambled past the window.

She stood and watched them, felt the tremble leave her charred body, thought,
I must go with them, wherever they’re going. I can’t be alone, please don’t leave me alone. I’m frightened and hurt and alone. And hungry...

She staggered across the kitchen and flung the door wide—

So very hungry.

—and watched a legion of her brethren stalk forth through the streets of a new world. A world ripe for the harvest.

They See You When You're Sleeping

“
Wake her.”

“
She’s only pretending to be asleep. I don’t have to wake her. I just need to wait until she opens her eyes.”

“
And what will you do then?”

“
I will take them.”

Sandra woke with a start, her ears already straining to hear the darkness and the muffled voices it struggled to drown out.

Something was here. It was more than I dream I know it was. Somebody was here in my room, looking over me.

She rose up from lying on her side, her hair hanging in dark streams above her pillow, eyes white and glistening.

Something—

Movement. With a gasp, she swiveled round to catch it.

Nothing except the lazy shifting of the curtains framing an alabaster monolith of moonlight. Her breathing slowed, the pounding of her heart releasing its iron brace on her skull and she peered once more into the crouching shadows in the corner of the small room. Nothing. She was alone.

There’s no one here.

Although calmer now, a spark of unease stayed alight in the gloom behind her eyes as she lay back down and tugged the sheets up beneath her chin.

But a moment ago there
was
.

The soft breeze caressed her face, brushing away the cobwebs of panic and lulling her back into sleep. It was dreamless.

“
I’m impressed. She never got a chance to move.”

“
What now?”

“
Do you need to ask?”

“
The skin, right?”

“
Yes, my favorite part. The skin.”

This time when her eyes snapped open it was because she had felt one of
them
, the people who spoke over her in her sleep like coroners over a corpse, running their fingers along her thighs, her arms, and her throat as if testing the pliability of her skin. Poking, prodding, jabbing and whispering their findings. She had heard them

(The skin, right?)

as if they’d been in her dream or screaming at her waking form. And yet, she was vaguely aware that they didn’t know she could hear them. She guessed there were two of them, one encouraging (goading?) the other into doing something unspeakable to her as she slept.

But where are they now?

Stricken with fear and convinced this was all too real to be imagined, Sandra threw back the covers and got up, her feet cold against the hardwood floor.

The night held its breath as she stood like a mannequin in the center of the room, listening. She wore her fear like a shroud of needles, every hair standing to attention as if it had a chance of defending her should the darkness decide to come crashing down.

The nests of shadow seemed to ooze from the corners of the room the longer she watched them; she shivered and went to the door.

In the very instant her hand slid over the brass door handle, the air was sucked from the room and her body convulsed, eyes widening, mouth opening into a small dark hole of unspoken horror. Her legs were drained of feeling and she fell heavily to the floor.

“
She’s a feisty one.”

“
I told you didn’t I? That’s why I chose her over all the others. She’s got spirit.”

“
Indeed. And she’s a magnificent specimen. Even without her skin.”

“
Yes, I imagine her heart will be quite a prize.”

“
Let’s find out shall we?”

Her eyelids fluttered open, irises widening as the light beneath the bedroom door began to come into focus.

Dear God, what’s happening to me?

Her dreams had always been vivid, but rarely had they seen fit to intrude on her waking life. Whatever she’d seen had been far more than just a painting drawn by the flickering hands of electrons and neurons—she was being haunted.

Slowly, she sat up, the arm she’d been lying on numb and heavy. She massaged it almost absently, eyes scanning the shadows.

Again nothing but particles of dust sailing through the slanted shaft of moonlight that ended in a blurry rectangle on the floor.

She got to her feet, the strange phrase whispering through the annals of her mind, chilling her with their inference. Her head ached, feeling as though the clenched fists of her unseen antagonists were hammering against the barred window of her sanity.

Next to her bed, a pair of green eyes glowed and her breath caught in her throat.

The clock.

With an audible gasp of relief and a brief smile, she shook her head and got to her feet.

The luminous readout on the clock told her it was close to midnight.

Confused and hurt from her rendezvous with the uncarpeted floor, she walked stiff-legged to the door and slowly reached out a hand to the brass handle.

Please don’t make it happen again.

It didn’t. Her hand gripped the knob and turned, admitting the light with a groan. Eyes narrowed to diffuse the amber glare; she shuffled along the hallway, passing the closed bathroom door and the guest room nobody ever used until she reached the stairs. A peek over the balustrade showed nothing but dim shapes staring each other down in the gloom.

At the foot of the stairs, she waited, anticipating what she had grown to call an attack, a seizure but none came.

Down here the house was warm and Sandra soon felt the icy threads of nightmare sliding off her spine. She passed the mirror in the hallway without looking at her wan, tired face and made her way into the kitchen. She thumbed on the lights.

A hum as they gathered the strength to illuminate the room…

A flicker as one surge of light begged to become another…

A charge in the air, like the sting of ozone as…

Oh no…

Sandra hit the floor, the cry banished to the pit of her throat as the darkness overcame her senses and dragged her down where they were waiting.

“
She’s beautiful.”

“
Yes. I’ve wanted her from the moment I saw her.”

“
Wanted her like this?”

“
Yes.”

“
Then I’m glad she’s yours.”

“Ours
. She’s ours. We must share what we take from her.”

“
As you wish.”

“
It has to be that way or this is all for nothing.”

“
Will you leave the eyes?”

“
No. You must never leave the eyes. They are the most important part of all.”

Sandra screamed and sat bolt upright, her shoulder cracking painfully against the wall but she felt nothing. As the scream died to a croak, she heard something she rather wished had stayed in the dream.

Voices. Faint but loud enough to escape the confines of imagination.

“…
keep her alive…costume…exposure of the flesh must lead…”

And then the reply, the whisper of a ghost that must surely exist, if not in her house, then in an abyss that had yawned open in her sanity.

“…
love you Samael…even if the flesh you wear will never…”

Sandra whimpered and clawed a hand up the wall, sank her nails beneath the plaster and hoisted herself up.

The voices seemed to be coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

“…
ill-befitting a Prince…without eyes to see the truth…”

Sandra pressed herself hard against the wall and covered her eyes with her hands.

“Go away, go away, go away,” she wept and they did.

For a moment she refused to trust the silence and when the somnolent buzz of the lights above her head filled her ears, only then did she open her eyes.

Stark white light filled the kitchen, making everything seem suddenly cold and unwelcoming as if she’d awoken in a stranger’s house.

It’s like a painting,
she thought
, or a movie set. It looks fake.

She swept wraith-like through the room, remarking on the sterile cleanliness as if complimenting the attention to detail of whoever owned it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is not my house. This is not my life.

What scared her more than this sudden frantic observation was the knowledge that even this awareness was not her own, rather given to her by some unseen force, like an invisible croupier dealing her cards she was terrified to look at.

She reached the back door, the beveled glass showing nothing but hunched moonlit shapes guarding this alien dominion. She was sure some of them were moving and the impression was enough to send her hurrying back through the kitchen, away from the door and her own imagination.

The sibilant whisper stopped her dead, liquid nitrogen rising from the floor tiles to freeze her in place.

“
The night is old, the Sparrow Man said

Though you can’t see it from your bed

Before sunrise, before the dawn

You’ll find yourself with reason gone”

It was too much, the panic and fear forming words within the fog of her scream in time to reach her mouth. “Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?”

The chant continued, soft yet spoken with barbed tongues:

“
The suit you wear to please the sun

Will serve you none when day is done

Instead you’ll find yourself returned

To where the sane and soulful burned”

Madness.

Sandra felt it tickle her brain, stirring the pot of trepidation and desperation with its bony fingers.

“Stop it!” she roared at the far end of the hall where a potted plant stood on a hunched-over bronze man’s shoulders. She wasn’t fooled. They were hiding over there. Somewhere beyond her ability to see, in some other realm, just a little out of synch with the reality she had always taken for granted.

“Where are you?” she moaned, tears trickling down her cheeks.

“
She’s ready,”
someone said over her shoulder and she spun around.

She found herself staring at nothing and it terrified her more than the drooling monster she had expected to see glowering at her. “Where…?”

“
I grow weary of her hysterics. Take the teeth and be done with her.”

“Where are you? Why won’t you come out?”

“
I’ve never taken one quite like this.”

Screaming, Sandra grabbed a knife from the block on the counter and held it out to fend off her own insanity for by now she had convinced herself that reality’s secrets could scarcely be so horrible. This was something unnatural; secretive whispers from somewhere other than the house.

“
It won’t be long before she gives in to it anyway.”

Sandra swallowed down a hard lump of terror, the knife stabbing empty air as she fixed her eyes on the bronze planter, waiting for the statue to raise his head and grin at her, revealing himself as the instigator of this terrible game.

But his reverence was unyielding.

The wall behind him however, wasn’t.

The knife slipped from Sandra’s clammy hand, a sudden cracking sound like a giant trampling skeletons almost deafening her as the pale pink-colored wall split from the second step on the stairs to the ceiling and rent apart with a teeth-jarring crunch. Chunks of plaster toppled from the opening and tumbled down the steps, skidding across the marble floor in the hallway.

Sandra exhaled breathlessly.

The crack in the wall breathed a plume of shadows.

She turned to run—propelled by a scream that whipped from her mouth and almost but not quite drowned out the sound of the wall dragging open—and caught her reflection in the gilded mirror by the front door.

And though her eyes widened in horror, the mirror told her she had none. Her skin prickled and froze, despite it’s noticeable absence too on the figure looking sightlessly back at her.

Flayed and blind, the creature nevertheless opened its mouth and joined her in screaming.

Even as the shadows rose behind the thing, behind her, she could not stop screaming.

“
Take them,”
someone urged.
“Make her complete.”

She scarcely felt their fingers reaching into her mouth.

There came an agony unlike any she had ever known, casting her instantly into a realm of glorious madness.

Stirrings

The mulberry trees stand like March’s dark soldiers at the bottom of the garden, soaked in shadow as they contemplate the birth of dawn, their ragged silhouettes conspiring to send extensions of themselves sprawling without grace across the freshly tended yard. Dew glistens and the insects begin the first tentative strains of their morning overture. Night creatures shrug off the responsibility of dawn and seek out the dark until the curtain deigns to drop on the world once more.