Ghouljaw and Other Stories (24 page)

He finds Cassidy on the couch, sitting upright, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. Cassidy’s plum-brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her eyes scrubbed clean of mascara and eye shadow—all this, along with the sweatpants and T-shirt she’s wearing, carries the effect of a girl in the first few stages of getting over a fevered illness, the fresh, after-shower sterility of a little girl who’s had a tummyache. Cassidy is positioned in front of the coffee table, her slender fingers laced together as though she’s preparing to flip a non-existent tarot card or shift an invisible chess piece.
Check. Mate.

It isn’t just the baby, Corbin muses meagerly. It’s everything. Through all this, Corbin understands he has one last decision before she can decide for him. Corbin strides across the living room and faces the bookcase, grabbing the ornate bookend and hefting it—
I’ll start my own goddamn library somewhere
—and then moving on to the next room. Cassidy is protesting but remains seated on the couch. He awkwardly fills a trash bag with what few clothes he has, some of his toiletries from the bathroom.

Night. A vacuum of blackness. And from that all-encompassing nothingness came the suppressed sound of a crying baby. Though this distant distress call has become familiar, almost expected, the stygian weight of sleep deteriorates as Corbin flinches awake with alert lucidity.

Tonight the baby’s cries were clearer, crystalline, and contained a more starkly defined sense of urgency.

Corbin threw back the sheet and threw his legs over the edge of the bed. The baby’s cries grew louder. Corbin was in the hallway by the time he fully surfaced from sleep, and that’s where his momentum hitched to a stop. Tonight, there was no doubt—the cries were coming from inside his apartment. Near. He suddenly understood with a flinch that the sobs were close—close as in several yards away. Corbin angled his gaze toward the sliding doors of the hall closet, just a feet from his face. The narrow passage was now filled with the panicked weeping. Corbin slowly drew up to the closet door. The distressed mewling was coming from inside. Inches, it seemed, separated Corbin from the source of the cries.

Corbin held his breath and took a tug at the door. It didn’t budge. Scowling, planting his feet apart, Corbin began prying at the door, trying to slide it open. This variety of panic coursing through him was a new thing, and part of him wanted to admonish this insanity, this unsound hallucination—
What the hell are you doing?

Corbin tried again and merely felt a strange, caulish yawn, as though the door were covered with some kind of unseen membrane. The baby’s cries had turned into a rapid-fire series of yelps, as if it were running out of air and could only submit sharply pitched pleas.

Corbin heaved against the door and examined it with a furious assessment. The cries continued. He clenched his teeth, recoiled a fist, and delivered a vicious, knuckle-studded punch into the door. Nothing. As he wheeled back and twisted away from the sliding door, his eyes searched the shadowed hallway. Desperate, Corbin scrambled from the corridor and staggered into the living room, dimly lit by diffuse orange light from the high-arc sodium vapor streetlamps, his chest rising and falling, his gaze tracing the furniture and objects in the room. He froze, his attention settling on something smooth-curved and glinting on the bookcase on the far wall. Corbin rushed across the room and snatched the heavy marble bookend from the shelf.

The scale of the cries were diminishing when Corbin returned to the corridor, as though the baby itself were fading away; but the unmistakable register of urgency—of fright in the face of finality—remained. Corbin took a deep, teeth-bared breath, drew the marble bookend over his shoulder, and drove it into the door. The plywood crunched with a slim, dark scar. Corbin growled and hammered down again, throwing his upper body into the movement and following through—this time the crescent trajectory of the swing resulted in a ragged, splinter-rimmed hole in the wood. The baby’s cries pealed out of that access and echoed into the hallway. Corbin dropped the bookend and began tearing the hole, ripping away jagged chunks of plywood with an intensity that mirror-matched the urgency of the child’s cries.

As he continued tearing, Corbin could now see that there was absolute blackness inside the closet—pure blackness, unpolluted by illumination. The depth of that darkness startled him. He curled all his fingers around the splinter-fringed frame and began to pull, his face straining as a large panel creaked, splintered, and finally broke free in a wide plank. Corbin tossed the wood aside and lunged toward the door, gripping the outer edge of the hole and peering inside. No longer astonished by what he might find, he drew his face closer—distant, twinkling, mercury-flicker light; he could feel cold whirl somewhere deeper within; but his attention was still on the baby. The hole was large enough for both his shoulders to fit through, so Corbin plunged his head and upper body in, his face and forearms bitten by frigid air and his movements inhibited as if underwater. It occurred to him that the proximity of the—he thought of Barb:
region . . . boundary
—was eclipsing proximity and he began to search frantically, his arms swirling against the black, fluid resistance within.

His fingers brushed against flesh. With a desperate lurch, Corbin wrapped his hands around the limb of a chilled-skin thing and began extracting his upper body from the hole. He placed his bare foot on the door and kicked, recoiling from the almost elastic connection, falling back and sinking to the floor. And in his hands Corbin cradled a pale form. The crying had ceased. From his modest bank of knowledge Corbin recognized, judging by its weight and proportions, that it was maybe nine months old. A baby girl. She had a dark-swirled pad of hair on her small head, and her prominent, inky eyes were fixed on Corbin, gazing at him, blinking from time to time, breathing soft and steady now.

Corbin’s heart was ticking with adrenaline quickness, and his first reaction was to exhale a sound that was part awe and part disbelieving laugh. There was the brief howl of cold air paired with the fleeting whiff of ozone, and then the narrow corridor was quiet. Corbin glanced over at the hall closet; within the hole he could barely make out the limp columns of hanging sleeves, and a beat-up, dust-covered vacuum was propped in the corner.

Though still cold, the baby was making contented, whimpering noises; its eyes—alert and as dark as the space from which it had emerged—searched Corbin’s face and seemed to return the reverence in his own expression. Corbin rose slowly, carefully, supporting the baby’s head with impulsive instinct.

In the faint light of his bedroom, Corbin searched for something to wrap around the baby. He spotted the hooded Chicago Bears sweatshirt hanging over the back of a chair. He tossed the garment on the bed and gently settled the infant onto the cotton material, tucking the heavy fabric securely around her.

The baby continued fidgeting contentedly at the air, its dark eyes searching the ceiling as though visually absorbing this strange place. Eventually, Corbin lay out across the bed alongside the infant, never taking his eyes off her. He listened to the sound of its breathing and lightly placed his hand over the infant’s chest, savoring the delicate yet enduring cadence of its tiny lungs. Soon, Corbin began blinking slowly, watching the baby before giving himself to the dark susurration of unconsciousness.

Corbin shuddered awake. It was early morning—the dingy drapes filtered gray light, painting the walls inside his bedroom with bluish bleakness. Hastily propping himself on an elbow, he searched the bed. The hooded Bears sweatshirt was crumpled there. Empty. No trace of the baby. Still, Corbin swept his hands across the bed, searching the sheets, the floor, and beneath the bed. But he knew it was useless. He exhaled and sank onto the edge of bed. He rubbed his eyes, which felt scalded and swollen. If he’d been crying in his sleep he felt as though a reprisal would take little effort. He stifled the urge. After a time Corbin shivered and reached for the hooded sweatshirt, foolishly expecting some residual warmth there. Nothing. For no reason he could think of, Corbin wearily slipped the sweatshirt over his head, pausing when he caught a whiff of ozone. It
was
warm inside. He allowed himself a sad, thin smile before shuffling out of the bedroom and into the hallway. He sighed, appraising the splintered wood scattered on the floor and the obliterated state of closet door.

Corbin broke his lease early but had saved enough money to cover the fee, along with enough cash (some of it left over from Barb’s generous compensation) to privately replace the sliding door panel in the hallway. Corbin enlisted a few acquaintances from the moving company to help him pack his things—not much—into a moving truck. As he labeled the boxes with a black magic marker, he thought of the old woman down the hall.

On his last day he stopped by Barb Whitaker’s apartment. She opened the door almost immediately, as if she been anticipating his appearance and had been eyeing his approach through the peephole.

“Hi,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Corbin.” She glanced past him. “I’ve noticed you’ve been very busy lately.”

“Yeah. I’m headed out of town. Back home.”

Barb frowned and opened her mouth to say something, but Corbin politely cut in. “Listen, I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

Barb’s face twitched with kind-natured suspicion. “Certainly.”

From his pocket Corbin withdrew a pair of keys to his apartment. “I have to turn these in before I leave. The building manager told me to slip them in the drop box by his office.” He spun one of the keys and detached it from the ring. With a crooked smile he said, “I told him I’d misplaced one of them.” He extended the key toward Barb. “But I thought you could use this, maybe snoop around the apartment after I leave, see if there’s anything interesting or familiar in there.”

The old woman’s conspiratorial smirk widened into a smile as she ambled forward and almost bashfully accepted the key. “Well,” she cleared her throat, “I don’t know what to say.”