Theater Macabre (8 page)

He paled.

Just the hangover
, he reminded himself, but even his inner voice didn’t sound convincing.

In the kitchen, the light splashed the walls and the floor in a way he had never seen. As he stared in amazement, he recalled countless mornings sitting with Carla at the table, the sun warming his neck. Breakfast now, would leave him squinting into the gelatinous golden orb streaming in through a window on the wall above the table. A wall that had once held a picture of two children holding hands as they walked through a sepia-toned cornfield. That picture, of course, was now hanging from the wall by the bathroom. Except the bathroom was not where it should have been either. Nothing was. It was as if someone had mounted mirrors around the house, reflecting a shifted likeness of reality.

Without thinking, and more than a little inspired by rising panic and the first few sparks of hysteria, Nick stalked across the room and was about to reach for the back door when he remembered, with a giggle that sounded like an expression of insanity, that the door ahead of him would more than likely lead him out to the front of the house now. The conviction was solidified by the fact that the handle was on the left side of the oaken panel. Sickened, he grabbed it and wrenched the door open.

His breath left him.

Sagging against the open doorframe, Nick gazed out onto a neighborhood that, despite his feverish hopes, had shuffled itself around while he’d slept. The street, which had always snaked between the houses and curved around to the left, now curved to the right. The hydrant on the curb had turned to watch. And the houses themselves, always so content to face the hills, now turned their backs on them, watching instead, the sea in the distance, lapping against a shore that had rebuilt itself to suit the change in the world’s direction, while the hills showed scars that had never been there before.

And on the mailboxes, the house numbers were backwards.

Oh God
.

The idea of the hangover, from which he’d siphoned only the faintest trace of comfort, abandoned him. No alcohol, no matter how potent, could induce such madness. But madness itself could, quite easily.

He stepped back and slammed the door.

Okay, Nick. Get a grip.
We can figure this out. Most likely it’s just a wire in your head come loose. Nothing irreparable. The main thing is to stay ca—

“Oh fuck!”

On the dresser, which stood in its proper place, had that place been at the front of the house where it belonged, smiling faces stared back at him. Friends, wedding pictures, deceased relatives…all grinning from within their frames. All their positions switched. One of them showed Carla’s dear departed Aunt Grace, beaming as an adolescent version of Carla and her brother Don sat on the old lady’s lap. In the wrong places. Another showed Nick’s father, scowling in jest at having his picture taken. The scar he’d earned from a fistfight had traded eyebrows.

Nick wandered ghostlike through the house, numb from the stress of having to register nothing in its rightful place. He was suddenly living in a mirror image world in which he was the only thing still adhering to natural law. Everything else had somehow been
reversed
.

He found a newspaper, the words backwards.

Paintings on the walls had been touched up to reflect the images as they might be seen in a mirror.

The control panel for the alarm, the television, the stereo…all on the wrong side.

Blind fear clambered over his shoulders and draped black wings across his chest. He began to tremble, and then:
Carla!

Of course. He’d call her at work, she’d tell him to go back to bed and sleep it off and that’s just what he’d do. In this case at least, he’d be willing to accept any suggestions she might have to offer.

But when he reached the phone, he realized he should have guessed that the numbers would not be in their proper places. The top left hand corner was a backward three. Resisting the urge to shatter the phone against the wall, he drew a deep breath and looked again at the numbers. Slowly, he dialed the number of his wife’s office.

After the third ring, a receptionist answered.

When she began to speak, Nick screamed.

*

An hour later, he stumbled to the bathroom mirror and stood just out of sight of his reflection in dread of what he might see in it. After all, he concluded, if the world had been reversed, then wouldn’t the people have been changed too? What if the human alteration had been something far worse than just a sweep of hair appearing on the wrong side, or a mole switching cheeks? What if the reversal occurred inside too? Or worse, perhaps the inside had become the outside.

Trembling violently, he closed his eyes and braced his hands against the cold porcelain of the sink. His breath came in ragged gasps, the sound of it unsettling him further. It did not sound human. Animal perhaps.

Or prey.

When at last he opened his eyes, he saw to his overwhelming relief that his reflection showed what it was supposed to. A little paler and more terrified looking than he had ever seen it perhaps, but it was Nick Lewis, with everything as it should be. Slightly crooked teeth, dark hair, dark eyes – not a face he had ever been too impressed with, but he loved the sight of it now. Strange relocating bathroom aside, it made him feel better to know he hadn’t undergone some bizarre transfiguration while he’d slept. Unlike the rest of the world. But soon, that bade another question. Why
hadn’t
he been changed? The woman on the phone certainly had, unless it had been a recording. No. It hadn’t. He’d known the voice – Sheryl, the receptionist at Carla’s office. He’d spoken to her a thousand times.

Thoughts of bizarre science experiments and meteors flashed through his head. He knew it was all ridiculously far-fetched, but awakening to a mirror-image world had seriously skewed his idea of what ‘far-fetched’ entailed anymore.

And then he remembered the storm, the peculiar red lightning. He still wasn’t sure if he had dreamed it or not, but he needed something, anything to hang this insanity from.

But what kind of a storm could alter the fabric of reality? It was an impossible train of thought and one he was desperate to dismiss, and yet it wouldn’t leave him, instead trailing him like a hungry dog as he wandered through an alien house.

He wanted to call Bill, to ask if he had put something in Nick’s drink as a lark, some new drug maybe, but feared what it might do to him if, like the receptionist, his best friend started speaking in reverse.

He wanted to run out into the street and see if anyone else had escaped the nightmare unscathed, but the possibility of what they might have become frightened him more, and he stayed where he was.

In the end, after bracing his nerves with a sizable glass of whiskey, he decided on the only coarse of action available to him.

He would sleep. For he had decided that the only viable, the only
rational
explanation for what had happened was that it hadn’t happened at all. He was dreaming, and while he’d never experienced such a vivid dream before, he was willing to accept this as an introduction to a whole other phenomenon. One that began and ended in his brain.

Once the decision was made, he began to feel better. His trembling subsided – a development he reasoned was due to the fact that he had uncovered his own mind’s nefarious scheme and, with the villain exposed, the charade could be abandoned.

Nick stood, and slowly made his way up the stairs at the wrong side of the house, using his hand on the wrong-sided banister to steady himself. And then he was in his bedroom, colored by the wrong angle of sunlight through the equally wrong window.

He collapsed on the bed and after a few moments of feverish mumbling, he slept.

*

He drifted awake and lay still and staring.

Confusion spun through him as he tried to focus on where he was and soon he remembered the dream, though he was not yet ready to let go of the apprehension it had instilled in him.

The light had faded, tinged with red and for a moment he almost moaned, sure the queer reality he’d imagined hadn’t been his imagination at all, but a curse he would have to endure until he died. But then he registered the dappling light on the ceiling, and realized what he was seeing were no more than echoes of dusk as night encroached on the world.

He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.

There came a slow, unsteady clacking sound. Nick flinched, his fingers gripping the covers tightly.

The stairs. Someone on the stairs.

He let his body relax and felt a new wave of exhaustion overcome him. He was in no hurry to leap from the bed and check to ensure that everything was in its rightful place, that he hadn’t awoken again into a world that had looked inside itself and been caught looking.

Carla’s smile would be enough.

The clacking drew closer, the familiar sound of heels on wooden steps, and then they paused outside the bedroom door, as they always did when she was trying to be quiet, trying not to rouse him. Such consideration always tickled him. She was polite enough to try to avoid waking him, but when he did wake, she would immediately chastise him for sleeping the day away.

Take a look at yourself in the mirror sometime
, she’d say.
A good look…

Nick thought it might be some time before he’d be able to accede to that particular wish without trembling.

The door to the bedroom swung open.

“Hey babe,” he said, sitting up and squinting to make out her shadowy form in the doorway.

And froze.

She was facing away from him.

“Carla?”

“Kin,” she replied, as she took a back-step into the room.

The Tradition

You're alone
.

She awoke, slowly, blinking to rid the darkness from her eyes, but it refused to leave. Instead it separated like a tattered curtain through which hung only feeble strains of light. It was dark, much darker than she liked, and it had been that way for as long as she’d been here, sitting on the stairs, waiting with the smell of mildew and dust in her nose.

What are you waiting for, Evelyn?

She frowned at the question, knowing the answer was there, hiding perhaps between those gently shifting veils of lighter dark, but it would not come. There was a purpose for her presence here. Of course there was. Perhaps it was only the muddle-headedness of lingering sleep that kept it from her, or perhaps it was not a purpose she wished to embrace. Perhaps she was here because it was a hiding place. But if so, from whom or what had she been hiding.

She forced a smile.

You're being silly.

Yes, most likely that was all. After all hadn't Chad always said—

Chad!
She seized on the name like a swimmer clutching a lifeline, and for a moment his face resolved itself from the gloom before her—a pale oblong briefly illuminated by cold light from a distant moon through rents in the rotten roof above. Then it was gone, scattered like dandelion seeds on an unfelt breath. She watched them drift away until they were swallowed by the shadows stretched across the debris-laden hallway floor.

Upstairs, a soft groan as the floorboards in a deserted room recalled the passage of a long-dead tenant. Then once more, the house remembered quiet.

Alone in an empty house, with nothing but the night and the solitary blade of blue moonlight that, freed of a cloud, sliced its way through the hole in the roof above her head, narrowly missing her slender arm, Evelyn sighed.

Although she was not afraid of where she had found herself, she was afraid she would never remember why and so be forced to remain here playing at being a ghost while her stricken mind struggled to remember...
why?
Why was she here? Had she fallen while exploring, perhaps striking her head in the very place that retained the memory of such intrusions? Gingerly, she probed the back of her skull and found only cobwebs, dirt, and what felt like the spine of an old dead leaf, which she plucked free and tossed away. There was no pain, no bruises, no dried blood, and now that consciousness had had time to return in full, no disorientation but for the obvious gaping hole in her recollection.

Lack of any apparent motivation for her ending up in such a curious place led her to consider briefly the possibility that it was all a dream, albeit an odd one in which she apparently had little to do.

Do I know this place?
she wondered, and peered at her surroundings in the gloom.

Most of the stair steps were broken, the old red carpet that had once lent it a regal aspect now shredded, worn, and in places, torn away. Leading away from the stairs, slivers of old marble tile could still be glimpsed beneath a chaos of plaster, broken furniture and the remains of an old chandelier. Through the resulting hole in the hallway ceiling, she could see straight up through the jagged teeth of broken floorboards to the room above and beyond its own shattered ceiling to the night sky, speckled with straining stars washed out by the moon. Strands of ivy hung down from the hole like hangman's ropes.

The main door of the house had once held glass in the upper half of the frame, but that was long gone, as were the boards that had been nailed to fill the hole.

Evelyn stood, tired of waiting for memory to catch up, and turned, the stairs creaking under her feet. At the top of the stairs, where the moon could not reach, the darkness was thick and unwelcoming, but Evelyn reasoned that if anything here meant her harm, it could have satisfied its need while she'd slept.

She moved up the stairs, carefully avoiding broken bottles and syringes left here by teenagers seeking a safe haven in which to become acquainted with Hell, and reached the landing. The hallway ahead was narrow, flanked by doorways in which the doors themselves had been removed, sold perhaps as antiquities to grace the jambs of newer places.