Unseaming (2 page)

Allen’s prose is among the more elegant and fluid among contemporary authors, yet at times clipped and lean. His skills as a poet, author, and journalist have synthesized into a voice quite distinct from his peers. Another strength that marks him out is his versatility. He skillfully adopts the mode best suited to the individual piece, be it anecdotal or lyrical. Whether he’s conveying the mind-bending terrors of “The Button Bin,” the bloody phantasmagoria of “The Blessed Days,” or downshifting into the more naturalistic dread of “The Hiker’s Tale,” Allen is in command of tone and development. He reaches into your mind and plucks the strings, smiling his jovial, avuncular smile as he manipulates the prosaic until it begins to change. Until it turns to jelly.

English professor and acclaimed author John Langan recently commented to me that one of the great strengths of horror is that it simply is, a thing unto itself that cannot be duplicated by any other literary mode. There’s something profound in that simple declaration. The essential uniqueness of horror is a quality embraced by
Unseaming
. Allen’s narrative concerns strike at what horror does best—illumination of the hidden, exploration of the taboo and the transgressive. Time and again he returns to themes of physical transformation, the disintegration of identity, and the mutability of mundane reality. How flimsy it all is, this universe we float through like seeds upon a tide! When immersed in Allen’s cosmos, you’ll gradually discover that nothing is safe; everything is permitted. Your family, your friends, your childhood toys all conspire against you; the universe itself roils and seethes beneath a smooth, cool varnish, ever changeable, ever malignant in its appetite. There is a real sense of isolation, estrangement, and jeopardy in these stories.

So, with these few words, the moment draws nigh for me to step aside and cede the stage to the man of the hour. If you are a casual fan of the dark fantastic, prepare for a few jolts of shock and amazement and, I daresay, a new appreciation of a genre that is all too often defined by its lowest common denominator. On the other claw, if you happen to be counted among the rare breed of horror aficionados ever on the hunt for something fresh, something worthy of the tradition set down by the Straubs and the Blochs and the Wagners, then get ready to have your fuses blown. With that, I bid you all a fond adieu as you venture into the gathering darkness…

You know he’s the one who made your beloved niece disappear.

He’s come out of his shop now, fussing with gloves that look expensive, a match to his long glossy overcoat. Glare from the streetlight glints on his bare scalp. Above that light, impotent clouds wall away the moon, render the sky a blank carbon sheet.

His odd little assistant left moments ago, her hose-sheathed ankles still overflowing her shoes as she waddled across the lot to her van. His car squats directly under the light, smart–except for these few minutes there’s no one to see him but you. Yet why would he worry? In a throwback town like this, with every house from a 1950s-era postcard, crime remains distant, alien, a single murder strange as an apocalypse.

You stand from behind the trash cans with your arm held out as if you’re warding off a demon, pointing the black pistol you took from your father’s gun safe.

You’re lucky. Mr. Lenahan sees you but doesn’t understand. In his moment of incomprehension you close the distance, press the nose of the Glock against the soft underside of his chin. He’s a big man, Lenahan, you’re looking up into his surprised round face.

Back in the store, you say.

He starts to speak, he wants to tell you he’ll give you the money, there’s no need to get rough, but something stops him.

It’s not the first time he’s looked you in the eye. Once last week, he helped you choose a bolt of fabric for a baby blanket, covered with baseballs and bats and mitts, you told him you wanted your fiancée to make it, he responded to your tale with rote coos and congratulations. And today, an hour before closing, you asked him to help you find a replacement button for one you ripped off your shirt just for the ruse.

Don’t see too many men come in here more than once, he said, with a smile full of hints and questions.

And he’s recognized you again. His eyes move as if scanning an inner catalog. He whispers, Your eyes are the same. Denise.

If you could silence your own heart to listen more closely, you would. Sweat drools down his wide forehead.

I can tell you where she is, he says.

You say, I know you can.

* * *

This is what she means to you:

Wide green eyes that mirror your own, peering shyly at you from the doorway of the den in your parents’ basement: you stretched out full length on the sofa, paging through T.S. Eliot’s silly book on cats. You catch her watching, a scrawny girl in overalls and a pink T-shirt, dark hair clipped back with a pink plastic bow, all this pink inflicted on her by your basket-case half-sister. She tells you that–My mom makes me–when you hold up your right hand, smallest finger extended, and say with infinite amusement, Hi, Pinky!

You see she’s about to retreat, so you wave the book. Ever read this before?

Dumbstruck, she shakes her head. She is ten, you are fourteen.

Wanna hear from it?

She nods.

So it starts. You become her warrior-poet, showing her nuggets to be found in your parents’ dusty academic volumes of Eliot and Poe, Yeats and Auden, Plath and Byron. Warrior, because you’re a killer of deer, ducks, squirrel, which repulses and fascinates her all at once. She comes along with you and your dad on one such trip that fall, you figure it’s going to be a boring stakeout in the woods, and you brought Wallace Stevens in your back pocket, because you want to creep her out with “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (you love the way she watches when you read, the way she shudders when you sneak something scary in on her) but it’s a bad day for boredom, a three-point buck wanders into view and she gets to see your father kill it, watches silent and thoughtful as you help clean the carcass. You wonder what she thinks of the blood on your hands.

She has her own life apart from yours, school, a few school friends, softball. You see her in her softball uniform a lot, and go with your parents to several games, though they don’t hold your attention you cheer loud for her whenever the chance arises, make sure she hears you. What you look forward to, face it, is her time with you, admiring your clever words–it’s not hard to seem constantly clever to someone four years younger–with those eyes so much like your own but prettier. It’s intoxicating. Exhilarating. Your drug of choice.

But her mother’s blood pumps through her heart. Your father’s wild first child, eighteen years older than you by a woman long vanished, whose very existence your own mom tolerates with pained, saintly silence. Your crazy half-sister, who accepted her fiancé’s marriage proposal as he sat behind the protective glass at the jail intake, the day after the cops brought him in for beating her. They never did marry–she found her senses for a brief time three years later, when he forced his fist into her mouth and made her lips split. And when she found those senses, went into the shelter, your father and mother agreed with stoic grace to help watch Denise. And because it didn’t take long for your sister to find trouble again, Denise spends a lot of time in your house, sleeping in the extra bedroom upstairs, polite little ghost with a burning curiosity stowed quietly inside, eating supper in the cluttered dining room while her mother shacks up with this bad man or that.

You shouldered your burden of guilt: she’s thirteen, you’re seventeen, charged with watching her while mom and dad spend Sunday out with those church friends, the ones your mom likes and your dad always bitches about. But you have a couple of your own friends over, sneaky middle-class hellions like yourself, sitting at the back patio table beneath the tacky umbrella, the three of you already high when Denise walks up. She asks what you’re doing, but she has an idea already.

Being the good son is all about what your parents don’t know.

She knows what you’ll do, because you’re the coolest uncle ever. She stares with thoughtful silence at the mystic smoke swirling inside the blue glass bong. You show her how to breathe it in. You and your chums giggle at her coughing fit.

You keep thinking about that moment, those giggles, her hurt frown, mortified she failed to impress you. You think about it two years later, when she runs away and your mom finds the needle hidden in the tape deck of your niece’s CD player. The way she’s scratching herself all over when the cops bring her back. The two of you together in the back seat during the ride to rehab, you as angry as mom and dad. You snap at her: I can’t believe you.

That same hurt look in her eyes, so like yours. Then her gaze flicks your way again. Read me something, she says.

I don’t have a book.

Can’t you remember something?

Bring me back, her eyes say. And you try. You recite what you remember: Fearful symmetry. The center cannot hold. Rage against the dying of the light.

She does come back, but never for long. And the last boy she takes up with, Billy Willett, that sorry sack of shit, he takes her somewhere that neither can come back from.

What they found of him wasn’t much. But he could still talk.

The county deputies think he was in a crash, his damned motorcycle struck in a hit-and-run during a late night kiss-your-own-ass curve on a mountain road. They found the wrecked hog, they found him down the slope, still alive despite all odds, most of him that was below the waist missing. Dragged off by animals, they think. His eyes gone too, pecked out by crows perhaps, while he lay unconscious on the old hillside. How he lived they don’t understand, he must heal up like Jesus.

Denise was with him, now missing. Can’t charge the boy with manslaughter with no body, and knowing her, so like her mom, she could be anywhere.

She was nineteen. You were twenty-three.

Willett gives you Lenahan’s name. He never gave it to the police. Just to you.

* * *

We can talk down here, Lenahan says. Just let me get the lights.

I see you fine in the dark. Keep the lights off.

How about this one? Just a desk lamp. No one outside will see it.

Go ahead, then.

The lamp’s slender fluorescent tubes do little to penetrate the gloom in the basement warehouse, a space much bigger than you expected from outside.

Lenahan’s shop used to be a schoolhouse, still has the look of a relic from a lost time; the street it fronts has surrendered to modern clutter, telephone poles and squawky burger drive-thrus. Even the schoolhouse’s Rockwellesque bell tower still points benignly at the sky, though the bell’s long gone.

The former school houses a fabric and craft store, one with a subtle reputation for eclectic and exotic selections that stretches for hundreds of miles outside the tiny dollop of a town where it nestles. Every room brims with bolts of fabric, regimented in racks or piled in bins, from burlap plain to prismatic textures and labyrinthine patterns that dizzy the eye. In at least two former classrooms long glass cases stand sentry, crowded with glittering baubles, costume jewelry. In the cavernous basement, tall steel shelves hold rows of thick fabric meant for towels, sheets, blankets, even tents. So many rugs hang from overhead racks, den-spanning designs of tigers, elephants, dragons, griffins, Egyptian gods and even wilder beasts, that they would make for mazelike layers of concealment if your quarry tried to run and you pursued–but he doesn’t try to get away, even though he must know this place by heart even in the dark.