INDELICATE INCIDENTS: 25-26
Bad dreams, bad choices, and bad intentions.
Note: I created a page about/with with trigger warnings for those interested, which given the content of some of my writing I probably should have thought of sooner. If you’re not interested in them, continue reading. We never had this conversation.
//cj//
25.
There’s blood on the walls the floor the ceiling thick red blood so dark I’ll never get the stains out. The building is stained, the rickety old house made soggy and weak by the gallons of blood flowing through the strip.
I’m thirteen and I’m trying, on my hands and knees, I’m trying so goddamn hard, arms aching and back sore, knees bruised from the uncompromising floor but the sponge is saturated with blood and the bucket of water has turned into thick black blood, thick as paint or corn syrup.
I taste it on my tongue, licking up my arm.
It’s not corn syrup.
Coating the floors with more and more thick blood. It’s getting worse and worse and my nails are ripped as I scrub and the floor sags beneath me.
The blood is everywhere and I can hear my parents coming, loud laughter and heavy footsteps. Stumbling. I don’t know how I made the mess but it’s me and while I’ve been cleaning the boys have disappeared somewhere into the unknown.
If I can clean up the house everything will be okay.
But I can’t find my brothers and I can’t clean the house and I am in so much trouble and the blood is going black and rotten.
It’s not my blood but it’s my blood, blood and viscera thick soft chunks of people or something worse than people it doesn’t matter I am surrounded by death and it’s on my tongue and under my skin forever and I’ll never be clean.
My parents are going to be so mad.
There’s still time The sponge is steel wool now and my hands look like hamburger meat no they look like tentacles, rancid and staining the blood black and I can’t make it clean, I can’t.
Then they’re here.
Dad with his tall, lean frame and his growing beer gut. Murky eyes and downturned mouth. Stinking of cigarettes and sweat. Booze leaking from his pores.
Mom with track marks on her arms and a dirty sort of beauty the drugs haven’t quite managed to destroy. Unkempt and unwashed, abrasive and animal. I see hints of my future self in the brutal twist of her lips, the wrinkles in her forehead.
You fucking little bitch, says my mom.
She’s wearing a pretty pink dress she tried to force me into as a kid. I’m wearing shorts I’ve patched so many times they’re falling apart because my mom keeps buying me skirts and won’t let me get new fucking shorts.
As if that would change things.
Look at the mess you’ve made, says my dad. Nothing but disgust on his face. Maybe a little distrust.
You fucking whore, says my mom.
I don’t say I’m sorry even though I am. Sorry and pathetic and I keep scrubbing and scrubbing and if I do better maybe they won’t be so mad at me. Maybe they’ll hate me a little less.
I’m sweating but shaking and I’m scared. I’m so scared and I can’t stop cleaning and all I am doing is making the mess worse. Spreading filth everywhere.
We pretended you were dead, says my father.
We wished you were dead, says my mother.
Freak.
Failure.
Ungrateful little cunt.
If you were dead we’d be alive.
I’m not crying but there’s blood on my face and my knees are bleeding and the room is filling up, tides of black red blood and my parents are laughing again, all malice and joy and they descend on me.
Blows to my face, my back, my arms. Fist to the jaw, foot to the gut. Skin splits and bones crack and as the thick flood rises around me, I finally relax. Lean into the pain.
This, at least, is familiar ground.
26.
‘Don’t call Nescio an asshole tomorrow,’ I remind Grady as he works.
‘I make no promises,’ he says.
‘Your issues with the government need to be compartmentalized while he’s here,’ I say. ‘I’m serious.’
‘I know,’ Grady says. There are bags under his eyes doing a fair impression of my own. He’s been up nights since this started. I try not to feel guilty.
I feel fucking guilty.
He can’t sleep. I don’t want to.
I prowl at night. Read. Plan recipes. Wander around in the dark looking for monsters.
Anything to keep me awake.
Grady is different.
Grady lays still and dead with his eyes open. Stares unseeing at the blank wall by our bed.
I can hear his mind racing. Burning itself up with the speed it reaches.
Quickfire thoughts behind his dark eyes. The silence between us is heavy. Pregnant.
I’ll stay in bed beside him. Listen to music on my headphones. Wait for him to fall asleep.
Wait for him to roll over and tell me what he’s thinking.
Words are never hard for Grady.
So I wait for him to tell me what’s keeping him up at night.
He never does.
I want to ask.
But then he gets to ask me. I don’t want to answer.
‘I’ll do my best,’ says Grady. He gnaws at his thumbnail. Tries to keep his voice neutral.
‘It’s for your own safety,’ I say. He laughs.
‘Yeah, censorship is always about safety.’
I understand why he’s angry. I do. Grady’s a glutton for knowledge. Obsessed with it in a way which never ceases to amaze me. It’s what matters to him. Discovering secrets. Sharing information.
Grady knows most of my secrets. The gruesome, deformed ones that infest me like cancer. And somehow, bizarrely, inexplicably, he still loves me. Likes me, even.
If he knew all my secrets, he might not.
The idea of hurting Grady makes me physically sick.
Still asked him for help.
I check the lock on the door. It’s still locked. Wiggle the handle again to be sure.
Below me, Grady types on his laptop. Hits the Return key violently.
He goes to stand over the corpse. Inspects it with an inscrutable look on his face. There’s sadness there, and a few other emotions I can’t decipher. He takes a canister of salt and makes a clumsy but serviceable circle around the table.
I want to go back to our apartment and spend the next decade deciphering every expression on his face. Pull him into our bed and make him forget any of this bullshit. Apologize in the best way I know how.
But Jakob is still out there. I keep my mouth shut.
‘Stand back,’ he says. I hurry to the bottom of the stairs and crouch down. ‘If shit goes sideways, you get out of here.’ Grady fixes me with a sharp, uncompromising look. ‘I’m serious. Don’t fuck around with me, Frank. Promise me.’ I nod.
‘I promise I’ll book it if shit goes sideways,’ I lie. He raises an eyebrow at me. We both know he can smell the bullshit. He doesn’t comment.
Grady holds open a worn leather-bound book the color of old moss. Reads from it in a beautiful dead language. The sounds of water lapping at rocks, moonshine and bottomless caverns. Secret and dark and endless.
I listen without understanding. The words wash over me in the soothing, familiar tones of his voice.
There’s a weird tension in the air. An energy you can almost taste. I smell something clean and sharp and metallic. Tornado weather. The text on the laptop screen rushes by at an unreadable speed, more a blur than individual letters or shapes. Grady’s voice rises.
I realize the metallic smell is coming from the corpse.
The body shudders and vibrates. A flash of light bursts from the corpse, bright enough to make my eyes water. The silence before the boom of thunder.
The body goes still. One hand drops from under the sheet. Hangs there, still and dead and quiet once again. There’s no sound of thunder to break the silence. Just the quiet of a held breath.
Grady and I are motionless. Nothing happens. Above us, the normal background noises of late night life in an apartment building starts up again.
We continue to wait. Nothing continues to happen.
I look at Grady and shrug. Grady flips through the book. His finger skims over the text, his brow furrowed.
‘How did it not work?’ he asks. Turns to his laptop and types. ‘We both felt an energy shift. So it worked. But it’s not working. Why is it not working?’ He frowns. Glances at the corpse. ‘I did everything correctly. Something happened, and power like this doesn’t just dissipate.’ He pauses, considering. ‘There may be a delay because of time zones and dimensional arcs-’
Under the sheet, the corpse twitches. The foot jolts.
‘Grady,’ I say in a high, strangled voice. The hand jerks, fingers curling and uncurling. Spidery and stilted movements.
‘There was a transference of power, which is what all this shit really is when you get down to it,’ continues Grady.
‘Just shifting power from one place to the next in one form or the other. It’s basic science. You can call it aliens or magic or shit from another dimension, but it’s about power and energy. How they work together. It’s all about understanding them.’
‘Grady,’ I say.
‘And I’m not getting any abnormal readings from the surrounding area, and the energy had to go somewhere,’ he says. ‘Something was here. We just need to find out where somewhere is, and how to find it, and then how to harness it. You know, easy stuff. ’
The corpse sits bolt upright. The sheet slithers down, exposing dark, wet-looking hair.
I scramble a few steps towards the door in a blind panic before I get myself under control. Grip the metal railing so hard I can feel it biting into my palms.
‘Grady,’ I say again, louder.
The head under the sheet turns towards me. Grady’s typing continues uninterrupted.
‘There’s no way I got this wrong, there’s no way,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t do this if I wasn’t certain. Fuck!’ He pushes his glasses up his nose. ‘I don’t understand. I spent months authenticating the damn book, I swear I checked everything, so unless those runes weren’t the real deal and I got ripped off by that fucking anthropologist -’
‘Grady!’
‘What, Frank?’ he says, exasperated. Turns back and sees the corpse.
‘Oh shit,’ says Grady in a small voice.
The hand, not quite grey but certainly not alive, moves to the top of the sheet. I hold my breath. With a sudden jerk, the sheet is ripped off.
Dead eyes and contorted skin of the cadaver. Echoes of a human. Head not quite centered. The corpse looks slowly from me to Grady, long dark hair hanging in lank hunks around her face. Her mouth moves, lips and tongue writhing and contorting before she finally makes a noise. It sounds like a crypt being opened.
‘Grady?’ I ask. I sound calm.
‘I see it,’ he says in a hushed voice. ‘I see it.’ Her eyes focus on me. Eight-ball black pupils surrounded by a slice of red irises. The mouth contorts into something meant to be a smile. At least, I think it’s a smile. Her teeth are human and not human. Every instinct in my body tells me predator. Every instinct in my body screaming to run.
Deja motherfucking vu all over again.
The corpse moves in bursts, like she’s figuring things out as she goes along. Arms swinging at her sides before going totally still. Naked, she’s thin, Delicate. Ballerina body, vulnerable and exposed.
Her lips pull back from her teeth. They’re closer to razors. Her head tilts to the side. Broken neck bone presses against fragile skin.
Armageddon summer eyes and a broken soldier smile, the demon lunges.