Theater Macabre (13 page)
Authors: Kealan Patrick Burke
A beautiful morning.
In the large white tract house where his wife lies shrouded in the security of dreams, Cole stands by the window, arms folded, reveling in the feel of the terry cloth beneath his fingers. His reflection is a tortured ghost peering back at him without the faint smile he knows has creased his lips. A stranger watches in the glass, hollow-eyed with disapproval.
A cardinal, a flying splash of newly shed blood, alights on the twisted limb of a withering tree bent low to the ground. Though the bark on the striated bole is crumbling, the oak wears this armor of decades with sagging pride.
From the bedroom, Marion moans, teased by wakefulness. Cole listens as she glides on the waves of an ethereal ocean wave back into the soporific dark of oblivion. He closes his eyes – shutters against a world of hurt – and imagines her there in that peaceful world, devoid of sharp edges and the madness that runs rampant round the waking world like a rabid black dog. She will be safe there.
Untouchable.
Unhaunted.
He huffs breath against the windowpane; it fills the yard with morning mist. The sight of it gives him an almost perverse delight, but not nearly as much as the raising of his finger, the writing of three simple words; so common, so devoid of meaning until now. With child-like care, he draws his finger down through the condensation and leaves his mark.
Stirrings. The bedroom. Not long now. He hears his name whispered and this time even the man in the glass, watching him from a face almost but not quite obliterated by his own breath, smiles with him. She is dreaming. Dreaming of him, and he hopes, happier times.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps she is snared in a ruthless dream, much like the one that trapped him for months until he awoke weeping and clawing for the air that had been denied his daughter. Perhaps she is at the pond with Samantha.
The thought makes a monster of his reflection, a seething thing with cold, lifeless eyes burning with self-hatred and accusation. Something akin to heartbreak ripples through his being, but of course it is just a memory. Old broken hearts seldom break again, or so often.
“
Cole.”
Her sigh floats through the crack in the oaken door that seals the lavender bedroom. The lace curtains on either side of him shift slightly, whisper against his finger and once again he closes his eyes, immersing himself in the smells, the sensations, the sounds of the old house, sounds he might have hated before, sounds he might have thought of as nothing more than the creak and groan of old bones settling around his cage of despair. Now he yearns to bear audience to its unique and aged symphony, for it is no longer commonplace.
“Cole?” He is jolted from his appreciation by a sudden and terrifying spike of horror driven deep into his skin. He is frozen, rooted to the spot before the mist-clouded window, an alien trembling holding him in place. The reflection is gone, unwilling to be privy to this blatant shattering of rules, rules so carefully dictated by the circumstances that have made his presence here possible. The cardinal takes flight, abandoning his post as sentry atop the wizened oak. The sun peeks a sleep-blurred golden eye above the blanket of the horizon. The shadows in the yard creep slowly closer; drawn to the occurrence of something ever so curious in the sunroom of the house.
“Cole?”
Not a whisper
. Not this time.
She’s here. She’s awake
. Stirrings, as of fabric whipping against the legs of the walker. Marion’s pallid face floats specter-like over his shoulder in the glass. Eyes even darker than his own, hair tousled in paralyzed waves of gray. He does not turn around. Cannot turn around for surely this is some cosmic trick, some divine sleight of hand, a momentary lapse in the concentration of the puppeteer. Because she cannot be awake. It is not possible. And yet…he prays it is.
“You’re awake,” he dares to whisper, his voice a chill breeze over an October lake. As soon as he has spoken he waits for one of them to wink out of existence now that the unthinkable had happened. Her hand touches his shoulder, recoils at the coldness it finds there. Then it returns, albeit restrained by the weight of uncertainty. Barely there. The shake of Cole’s head is slight. “You
can’t
be.”
“I thought you were gone,” she tells him, her beautiful voice marred by grief and sleep he knows she is afraid to completely abandon in a reality she has grown to distrust. “I thought you left me.”
Cole is caught in his own cocoon of bewilderment even as her breath tickles the hair on the nape of his neck.
Why am I still here?
“I thought you were gone from me,” she says again, but this time the words are spoken through the fingers of a hand anguish has summoned to her lips.
We’re a stage play
, Cole thinks then, his innards tugged by hope and pain and dread.
A silent movie with the quiet as the soundtrack to our stalemate
. They remain still and quiet, afraid to move, lest all of this suddenly reveal itself to be nothing but a joke, a fleeting tantalizing glimpse of hope never to be caught again. On the window the ghost of Cole’s breath begins to vanish; the words he wrote there fading.
They will come again
, he knows.
They will come
with the rain when I am gone
.
“We better not wake Samantha,” Marion whispers and it is such an unexpected thing to say, such a peculiar statement that Cole finally turns around to face her, dragged by uncertainty to look full upon her. Her eyes are at half-mast and with a heart split between relief and mourning, he realizes they have been all along.
“Samantha is sleeping,” she says softly, weaving slightly where she stands atop slumbering feet. Her sleep-tangled hair frames a face aged by loss, carved with the rough hand of grief at watching her husband and daughter die before her very eyes. Cole sighs and the morning light warms them as he lays a trembling hand on his wife’s elbow and carefully guides her back to her room, to what was once
their
room, where they laughed and cried and made love. Where nothing could get them until the pond took their child and anguish made Cole follow her into the dark.
Sad times which even death does not allow escape from. Sad times which have left Cole – once a loving father, once a loving husband – a haunter of morning, a husk of trapped and awful emotions, condemned to live on in the twilight of his wife’s dreaming, a shadow wandering the borderland between sleep and waking. Where she can never see him.
Gently, so gently, he lays her down among the frozen white waves of the sheets. She frowns at the abrupt end to a hopeful dream as her eyes drift closed and she turns away from him. The motion is symbolic. So many nights, so many times they needed each other did they turn their backs and suffer alone. As they suffer now.
Cole, gripped by sadness, steps back and gazes down at her, the memory of weeping shifting inside him. A fleeting ghost. Gold light burns beneath the door as the day catches fire. His shadow rises on the wall next to the bed. There is a small crack in the plaster. There is a small crack in everything and both of them have just shared one. Marion stirs, moans. For a moment he wishes her awake.
Her breathing grows shallow. Cole brushes his lips against her forehead, watches an aborted smile slip from her lips and leaves the room. The sunlight has filled the window, lacing the words with an amber glow; the signature, the childish but so very significant mark he has left on the glass:
I WAS HERE
He feels another tugging inside, this one more painful than the last and altogether different. The sun fills his eyes with liquid sadness. He looks back over his shoulder, through the crack in the bedroom door at the sleeping woman, at his wife, and chokes the yearning to run to her, to cast off the concerns of what might happen should he rush to her, grab her tight and never let her go. Would she come with him? Dust feigns emotion and surges up his throat. It is too late for such frenetic desires. It is time. He waits a heartbeat, watches the sheets. The rise and fall of her breathing.
She moans.
“Marion,” he says, softly.”
Now.
She sits bolt upright, her face a mask of grief-stricken horror, her skin pulled tight at the behest of a mouth open in silent screaming. Black sleep flees her eyes and she looks at Cole through the narrow space between door and jamb. A whine. Cole feels the tugging try to shear him in half. Marion shrieks, a deafening, horrifying sound of utter loss, of unending pain and suffering. Of pleading.
The sunlight is cold.
Finally, she yells his name.
And he is gone.
In all my years I have never given matters of the strange much consideration. Indeed, the distinguished gentleman might have more fortune in my company professing his secret and most dreadful desires than attempting to sell me his visions of specters and unsatisfied revenants or goblins and gargoyles come alive to thwart the contentment of their progenitors. I have never seen the maritime dead clambering over the bridge of flying cutters nor witnessed graves yawning open to expel their occupants like unwanted babes from an ill-prepared womb. I believe reanimation of dead tissue to be nothing more than the fanciful musings of half-mad Englishwomen. I have never felt the cold eye of vengeance chill the nape of my neck when I’m sure solitude is mine, nor have I felt any matter of fowl wander across the future place of my rest. I refuse to cross myself under any circumstances, be it in the proximity of a church or any such blessed locale. The underneath of propped ladders prevents no obstruction in my wanderings and I find the notion of circumventing fissures in the pavement a most preposterous conceit indeed.
I am not—lest ye have failed to draw the obvious conclusion—superstitious in the least. I am not a believer in the unseen, the unexplained or the unproven. Such fancies are for wastrels with visible rents in the coats of their contentment. There are far more pertinent ways to squander one’s existence. For me, it is reading and writing, and while I don’t proclaim a particular proclivity toward either, I do however feel it a wiser choice of hobby than avoiding cracked mirrors and black cats (the latter being my companion of choice). My father was an artist—he would have approved greatly of my pursuit, even if my mother views it as little more than a means of expediting my passage to poverty.
However—and though I am loathe to admit it, even here on this page where perhaps my words will stay unread or twisting in flames when I feel I’ve reached the limit of my forbearance—tonight I received a visitor, a most curious man and one who, without apology, claimed more success than I am ever likely to attain with these half-hearted ramblings. I embraced his arrival—even if I was a little confused as to his motives—as a means of convincing him to instruct me on the ways in which I might better my craft (and I use the term ‘craft’ with a modicum of levity, for I should admit my skills leave quite a bit to be desired, so much so that I have of late been considering abandoning my literary struggles in order to procure a more palatable and financially sensible career. This is a thought that occurs quite regularly but is seldom lent an audience).
But the point I strive to make is thus: He was another of those who, by his words, sought to stir in me a curiosity, if not an outright acceptance, in that oft bandied-about belief that all that we see is not all there is.
And so it was that a man named Poe arrived at my door, shivering and gaunt of face, his clothes sodden and necktie askew. His small narrowed eyes burned like coals in that pale countenance, his manner so alarming that—perhaps foolishly, given the spate of recent murders that have plagued Baltimore of late—I made way for his entrance without so much as questioning his presence on the step.
“Good Lord,” I said, hurrying to the decanter on the sideboard, “you look like death itself!”
At my back I heard the door close, slowly, but no response was heard from my guest.
“First some brandy,” I told him, “and then we’ll get you dry.”
I carried the brimming drink to where he stood staring by the door, and in the light I hesitated. He really was a ghastly looking fellow and it occurred to me that the blame could not be levied solely on the rain or cold. A chill seemed to radiate from his cruelly thin frame, each shudder furthering a wave of iciness across the room to where I stood frozen, drink in hand. His hazel-gray eyes seemed to be looking and yet not seeing anything but whatever maelstrom whirled within his own mind. Beneath an unclipped moustache, a tight mouth muttered unintelligibly. He was inappropriately dressed for the inclement weather, his topcoat unbuttoned midway down, white undershirt sodden. A saturated crimson necktie gave the unsettling impression that it had been used to staunch the flow of blood from a vicious wound.
Despite my heretofore-unwavering beliefs and practices, I was suddenly struck with the fearful notion that I had admitted a demon.
“Are you all right?” I asked, in too low a voice to be heard.
“My name is Edgar Poe,” he said, in a silken voice and lowered his gaze to the drink now quivering in my grip. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me?” There seemed a hint of desperation in the question, giving the impression that his very livelihood depended on my answer. His head jerked as he spoke, as if the words had to be wrested from a snare in his throat.
“I’m afraid the ability to retain names isn’t among my sparse talents,” I said, at last handing him the drink, which he took, cupped in his trembling hands and drained in one gulp with nary a shift in his expression. “But it’s quite possible I’ve encountered your name before. Let me fetch you some towels and dry clothes, then perhaps you might enlighten me as to where I may have seen it.”
He gave no indication that he’d heard, or appreciated my hospitality, but merely stared at the empty glass as if mourning the ghost of the brandy.
