Theater Macabre (11 page)
Authors: Kealan Patrick Burke
“Jesus!” He staggered back, curls of black hair poking through the hand he clamped against his damp chest.
The girl straightened, her legs horribly warped and twisted as if by some disease ignorance and half a proper education had kept from Brett’s awareness.
She was naked, her chest yawning wide in a bloodless and pitch-dark vertical eye. Her almost-white hair had been cropped short, seemingly by a blunt scissors and with little affection. Beneath the alabaster brow, milky, leaking white eyes stared at Brett.
“Where is she?” the girl hissed and Brett shook his head, perplexed and frightened all at once, inspired to flee but paralyzed by amazement at what the deceptively benign washer had birthed. The child’s face was crisscrossed with angry red scratches that looked fresh and drew the eye away from the perverse exposure of her chest cavity.
“Who are you?” he stammered and felt the wall behind him for his tennis racquet.
“Where is she?” the girl repeated and twitched as if shocked by a sudden current from the machine at her back.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Her face crackled into a toothless smile. “Yes, you do. She loved you.”
Brett frowned and felt his stomach tighten, sending bile shooting up his throat.
“She loves you, but you did some nasty things to her, didn’t you?”
The child wobbled forward and Brett was compelled to abandon his search for a weapon. Watching the child—who to all intents and purposes should be dead—closing the distance between them, he reluctantly acknowledged the fact that nothing would save him from this waking nightmare. He couldn’t possibly fight something that God hadn’t created.
The child stopped, smiled. Crackle. She cocked her head and stared up at a point in the corner of the room, somewhere above where Brett’s bladder was at that moment giving up the ghost.
God, please help me
, he thought.
I’m a fucking addict and I’ve made some bad calls, but I’ll make it up to you if you please, please, please make this thing go away.
“I hate her, you know,” the child continued and Brett flinched, his shoulder blades attempting to force their way through the wall as if this bizarre scenario nullified their obligation to stay within their owner’s body.
The child looked back at him. The motion was accompanied by the sound of shells being crushed underfoot as the ragged bones in her neck ground together.
“After you made me, she hurt me. It was awful.”
“Who?”
The corners of the girl’s mouth drew downward in synch with her brow. “Why are you pretending you don’t know?”
Brett swallowed, his voice close to breaking. “Because I don’t. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who ‘she’ is. I don’t have a fucking clue what’s happening here.”
“You put your dirty thing into her, so you must know her,” she said.
“What?” To hear this coming from the mouth of a child, or whatever the hell this thing was, spun the volume up on his fear.
“You put your dirty, filthy thing into her.”
“Into
who?
”
The girl stepped closer, swaying on her broken feet, the bones rolling beneath mottled greenish blue skin. “Into her.”
The sob escaped, forced outward by the weight of desperation buoying to the top of his throat. “I don’t understand.”
This time when she smiled, it was almost human. “Don’t worry. I didn’t understand either, until she used a clothes hangar to teach me. Did she try to make you understand?”
He slid to the floor and lowered his head, welcoming the darkness when he covered his weeping eyes with his hands.
It’s not real. I’m not seeing her
. He repeated this over and over and over again, sometimes aloud but more often in his head, where nothing could touch him.
“Not to worry,” the girl croaked, and this time her voice sounded awfully close. “I’ll help you understand everything.”
Brett, braving a peek through the safety of his fingers, only saw her eyes before there was nothing left to hide behind.
*
“Jason?”
Charlotte trotted up the dark stairs, drawn like a moth to the amber glow from the room at the top of the steps. She felt a mild sense of panic leave scratch marks on her heart as she eased the door open fully. She expected to see the most horrible thing imaginable—nothing.
Her fears evaporated at the sight of her husband standing at the window, staring out at the rain, the room filled with the distant swish of traffic sailing through the wet streets below.
“I thought you might have left,” she said, shrugging off her coat and draping it over the arm of the floral-patterned sofa. Ordinarily, she might have been concerned about dampening the fabric, but not now. Not today. Not when she was in danger of losing Jason.
“All the way home I imagined what it would be like to come back and find you gone,” she continued when he didn’t respond. She stopped a few feet from his back, wanting to touch him but afraid he might recoil from her. These days, everything seemed to push him further away. The thin curtain that hung between her love for him and her grief at having lost him was rapidly coming loose from the rail.
“How long?” he said coldly, not turning around to look at her.
She hugged herself and stared at his back. “How long what?”
His shoulders shook. Laughter? Tears? She silently pleaded for him to turn around, to face her, just so she could see his eyes.
“How long has it been?”
Again her hands floated toward the black shirt, underneath which lay the skin she yearned to feel beneath her fingers. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do, Charlotte. I want you to tell me.”
She sighed and let her hand fall away, imagining how the two of them would have looked to anyone else.
“Almost three weeks.”
This time she heard the slightest chuckle, devoid of mirth and colder than the rain still trickling down her face.
“Why am I here?” he said. “How am I here?”
Tears welled in her eyes. She touched him, watched him flinch.
“Because I need you to be here.”
*
Scott ran.
The street swept beneath him, his feet a blur, the puddles reaching up to soak his jeans, and he ran, wheezing, cursing until his lungs filled with molten lava.
But stopping was not an option.
Not so long as
she
was behind him.
He rounded the corner of the alley and collided with an elderly woman who squawked in surprise and fell heavily to the pavement, her plastic sack vomiting groceries out onto the road. Scott muttered an apology as he leaped over a rolling tin of canned peaches.
He ignored the enraged yells and cries of disgust from the people no doubt moving to form a protective huddle around the fallen woman.
Fine, let them
, he thought.
They aren’t running from a fucking corpse.
A quick glance over his shoulder made his heart lurch and his stomach hurt.
She was there—still behind him, still gaining—and he wondered how fast she was capable of going, if there was any point in running from something that didn’t need to use its feet to move.
But the fact that Tracy had come back for him wasn’t the worst of it. Oh no.
The fact that he had slit her throat and almost decapitated that bastard she’d been blowing when he’d come home from work early should have put the whole mess to bed. But now here she was, floating two feet over the pavement like a ghost but proving herself all too tangible by thumping against people who shrieked and fled and thanked God it wasn’t them she was after. He imagined them crossing themselves and soon moving on, muttering about the return of those long buried and how the world was going to hell.
Tracy filled his head with whispers, deadly promises and obscene threats, perhaps attempting to drive him mad. Madness was an eventuality he felt drawing as close as the reanimated parody of his dead girlfriend, hung like a puppet from God’s fingernails and gliding toward him through the rain.
Another look over his shoulder and she was near enough to grab him.
With a strangled cry, he turned and raced down an alley much the same as the last, plumes of steam billowing upward toward a sky the color of steel, the concrete hollowed and filled with rainwater. She swooped into the entrance. Her long black hair was knotted but dry, despite the deluge hammering down from above. Her head lolled on a ravaged neck, black marble eyes fixed on her murderer.
“What are you running for?” a guttural voice asked and Scott slipped attempting to come to a full stop. He went down in a puddle and gasped at the cold against his skin.
He looked up at the man towering over him and paled. “You!”
To anyone else, the guy with the baseball cap might have appeared normal, unless you looked closer, peered beneath that chiseled jaw and saw the tendrils of flesh dangling from the dark hole where his throat had been hacked open.
“Oh, shit,” Scott moaned and backpedaled away from the grinning form of his dead girlfriend’s lover. A cold breeze stopped him and he deigned not to look.
“Caught,” she said as if it were nothing more than an innocent game of tag.
“I’m sorry,” he whimpered and raised his arms over his face, anticipating a blow.
“Oh, there’s no need to apologize,” the man with the baseball cap croaked. “You did us a favor.”
“What?”
“We’ve come to return it,” Tracy whispered and grabbed a handful of his hair. Scott screamed as he was dragged to his feet. Rainwater blinded him, pounded against his widened eyes, reducing the clues to his fate to mere blurs. He felt the wind breathing down on him as he was lifted higher and higher and higher still, until the air grew cold. Tears ran and mingled with the rain.
“Please, Tracy, I’m sorry,” he moaned, his voice strangled with sobs. He blinked and saw they had risen above the buildings. He shut his eyes, sobbed, his adrenaline fueling the stuttering engine of self-preservation and fooling him into thinking he might make it out of this alive.
“Now, now. Don’t worry,” Tracy gurgled. “David will catch you.”
Scott almost allowed himself to be comforted, until he realized what she was saying. She meant to drop him from this height. How could her dead lover possibly...?
Her hands were gone. He fell. The ground rushed up to meet him. And as he drew in a breath to scream, he saw her lover waiting below and it registered in Scott’s horrified, dying mind that David was not holding his arms out to catch him, as Tracy had promised. Instead, his mouth was open and growing wider.
And wider still...
There would not be time enough to scream.
*
Angela slid the key into the lock and paused.
He’s in there
. She nodded imperceptibly, as if the prompt had come from somewhere other than a dark, whispering knot in the center of her own mind. Sucking a long breath in through her teeth, she opened the door.
The hallway was dark and she proceeded slowly through it, her eyes probing the corners for leering faces.
He got in. But how?
She had made sure her apartment was locked up tight before leaving it this morning.
How could he have gotten in?
Fool
, another part of her whispered.
You know doors don’t stop them. They’re not ghosts but they’re much more than just walking corpses, too. You know that.
She could feel electricity tingling beneath her skin as she reached the kitchen and gave a quick glance upward toward the cracked ceiling, where she half expected to see him hiding. Nothing but stains.
Angela put her purse down on the kitchen table and hurried to the phone in the living room, thinking:
If he’s here, will he let me make it?
A shaky sigh escaped her as her hand found the receiver. She dialed. Immediately a shadow crossed the walls. But she couldn’t turn. Couldn’t look at what might have crossed the room, what might have thrown its cold shadow against the walls as it passed the narrow wedge of light peering in through the partially drawn curtains. She sensed the room shrinking away from her, a cold lump twisting in her throat, then gagged, as a stench of rotting meat embraced her, invading her mouth and crawling deeper down. The room was small. The rank odor filled it quickly, bringing tears to her eyes. Then something tugged at her hair.
“You bitch,” an all too familiar voice said. “Daddy wants a word with you.”
She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the feeling of his uncut nails hoisting up her skirt, her raincoat, leaving cold tracks like snail trails on the backs of her legs. Her lower lip quivered and she sank her teeth into it. “Go away.” The curtains shifted, setting off a skirmish between shadows and light for dominance on the wall to her right.
The fingers scratched their way toward her inner thigh. “Remember what my pal Tommy said when they asked him if he had any final words? He had a little mantra. Remember? Just before they threw the switch?”
The phone continued to ring in her ear, the receiver trembling in her white-knuckled grip. Her lip began to bleed. “Please,” she whispered. The nails became fingertips, scratching against the soft flesh of her buttocks.
“He said, ‘Never Deny the Guy the Pie.’ Remember that? And you’ve been denying me the pie for a long time, haven’t you?”
She could feel the weight of him behind her, his foul breath against the nape of her neck.
A click from the phone. “Hello?”
The hands were ripped away. Angela jolted, winced, wondered if the wounds were deep enough to bleed. The room exhaled, returned to its natural state, but she knew he was there, like a magician who had apparently vanished into thin air but was merely hidden by mirrors. “It’s Angela,” she said into the phone.
“What do you want?” Charlotte asked with barely concealed impatience.
“I want to know how you did it.”
“Did what?”
“Don’t play the fool with me. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Daddy was here. I want to know how you did it and what the hell you thought you were doing. Was it the mirror? His mirror?”
Silence, but for a faint crackling on the line.
“Charlotte, take a look out your window. Can you tell the dead from the living anymore?”
Charlotte cleared her throat. “It’s because you’re a sensitive, isn’t it? An easy explanation. You’re seeing all of them. I only see the ones I want to see.”
Angela chuckled dryly. “Is he the man you married? Did bringing him back also bring back all the love and happiness you had hoped? Will he be happy living again with his all-important looks rotten and ruined?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Charlotte said, her voice now matching her sister’s with its uneven, quavering tone. “He’s home and that’s all that matters.”
Angela closed her eyes and forced herself to be calm. “So you pretend he’s your darling husband, even though he’s some monstrous thing. They’re not quite ghosts, Charlotte. That’s why you can touch them. They’re corpses, brought back from the dead by foolishness. How far does this need to go before you acknowledge it as a mistake, an error spawned from your grief and loss? And if you manage to convince yourself everything is fine and dandy, what about me? What about your sister? Do you think I’ll survive with the decaying flesh of our bastard father sprouting from the walls at every turn?”
Charlotte said nothing.
“Jason may not hurt you. He may, in fact, be incapable of hurting you because he’s one of the gentler ones. But Daddy isn’t. Daddy died and—”
“No,” Charlotte interrupted. “Daddy didn’t die. You killed him, remember?”
Angela’s fingers tightened on the receiver. “He deserved it. Or doesn’t that matter because he gave you everything and stole everything from me? The man was a cold-hearted, child-molesting psychopath who dabbled in things no man should know. But even now, you’d use one of his evil toys to satisfy yourself. Spoiled little Charlotte.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Fine. Have my death on your conscience then, as long as your world fits the insane picture in your head. But remember that your world may bring the end of everyone else’s.” Angela slammed down the phone.
Almost immediately an intense wave of cold air flooded over her, cementing her feet to the floor.
“I’m going to get me some of that fine pie, Angie, and you’re going to love every minute of it.”
Angela moaned as the hands returned, pushing her forward roughly. A cloak of darkness swept around her as he chuckled into her ear, and the room withdrew once more. But not before she was granted a glimpse of rotten, purple flesh sliding from the arm that curled around her throat.
This time she had no doubt there’d be blood.
*
“Where’s Scott?” Jason asked. He was still staring out at the city, watching a veil of twilight descended quickly over the buildings, forced down by the weight of rain.
Charlotte switched on the lamp beside her armchair and sighed. “He left here a few nights ago in a blinding rage. I think he finally realized what his precious girlfriend has been up to behind his back. I imagine she gave him a sob story and they’re away somewhere patching things up. Silly child.”
“Has he seen me yet?”
Charlotte gave a short, unconvincing laugh. “Of course he has. You’re his father.”
“Has he seen me like this?”
Charlotte’s forced mirth dwindled to nothing. Please look at me, she thought. Please. Just a glimpse. “No.”
“And what do you see in me as I am now?” His voice was flat, emotionless. Empty.
She considered his words, but they were overruled by the recollection of what her sister had said earlier: “Is he the man you married? Did bringing him back also bring back all the love and happiness you had hoped? Will he be happy living again with his all-important looks rotten and ruined?”
Yes
, she told herself.
Yes, I damn well will be happy, and he will be happy, too, once he remembers.
Remembers what?
a sneering shadow in her mind countered.
Remembers your affair? How he walked in on you getting it from your tennis instructor? That was a magic moment, wasn’t it? Coming home and finding him watching the video was even better. Should have a golden memories photo album for that one, don’t you think? Pregnant? Not a problem. A clothes hangar right through the fetus’ chest did the trick, leaving Tennis Boy sans worry and your husband with a heart attack.
Stop it
, she almost said aloud, and clenched her teeth, willing away the pessimistic shade. “Honey, please look at me.” Jason said nothing, continued to stare at the darkening street.
Yes, I’m sorry for the affair, but he paid our debts, dragged us out of the hole Jason had dug. If not for him, we wouldn’t have been able to keep our nice home, have our two cars and—
A dead man in your living room.
—
everything we’ve ever needed. I’m sorry, yes. But I’d do it all over again if I had to.
“Honey?”
His shoulders might have shifted; Charlotte couldn’t be sure, but now it was incidental. The crawling horror that was steadily forming a shawl over her spine made her consider the awful truth that maybe, just maybe, she had made a mistake in bringing him back. What possible good would his return serve if he refused to look at her? It would only remind her of how he might have been had the affair not killed him.
“I can’t look at you,” he said finally, in the same dead tone.
She got to her feet, hands clasped to her breast, radiating need. “Why?”
His shoulders shook again, and she felt a twinge of sorrow in her stomach. “Honey, why?”
As she drew closer, she realized he was not weeping. He was laughing. The soft, dry rustling of his mirth drifted over his shoulder and she stopped dead, watching the pale slope of his bloodless neck as he slowly shook his head.
“I can’t look at you, Charlotte dear,” he said in a voice made watery by amusement, “because they stitched my eyes shut.”
“‘They’?”
There was no time for panic, only dazed amazement as she looked from his trembling form to the reflection in the window. What she saw superimposed over the fading city forced her mouth open and tore out a scream.
“Yes, dear,” he answered, nodding once. “Those who make us what we are.”
“Nooo,” she cried, gripping the sides of her face, dragging her nails through the skin as he turned toward her. Patches of purple and black mottled his stark white skin. The stitches in his eyes had ripped just enough for her to see the oozing, tarlike blackness rolling beneath the lids.
“Oh, don’t do that,” he said with a crooked smile. “Don’t damage your face. I need it. I mean, I can’t very well go outside looking like this, can I?”
*
Angela was lost amid moving tunnels and—
They said the light was supposed to be white not red not red not red...
—shifting shadows whispering feverishly in her ear.
She was dimly aware of her father working over her dead body—
Cutting, slicing, chewing, licking, tasting, eating...
—but it was as if she were watching the depravity being bestowed upon another.
She was free, free to pick her destination from the myriad tunnels, each drawing her in a different direction so that even her spirit rent apart under the magnetic pull of indecision.
Eventually, she chose a scarlet rectangular doorway. It looked familiar—
Charlotte used daddy’s mirror to bring them back...
—and as she neared it, she felt the warmth radiating, burning, searing, scorching, and she screamed, jumped, tripped, fell, sprawled across the doorway and emerged in a room of a different color, where the shadows stood still and a stairs led to a light—
The right light right color saving light...
—at the top of the stairs.
Home
. A brief smile flickered across her blistering, smoking features, but was singed away by realization. She looked behind her and saw herself. Charlotte’s mirror—
Fashioned from the ground-up bones of the dead and the skin of the living. Part of Daddy’s collection...