Grinning Cracks Read online

  Amyl turned in the direction Fail indicated. “That’s where we’ve been going all along,” he replied, standing and circling around next to her. “That’s the citadel, that’s where Mister Head grinds the bones up.”

  “It’s close,” Fail observed. “Somehow I thought it would be farther.”

  “Closer than gettin’ back home, that’s for sure,” Amyl agreed.

  She looked up at Amyl. “I want to stop him,” Fail said. “Think I can?”

  “No, miss, no!” Ilden cried.

  “You don’t have to come,” Fail said. “Any of you, you can all stay here, you can all go home, I don’t care.” She picked Shelly up and pressed her into Amyl’s arms. “But I’m going, and I’m not coming back until someone’s dead.”

  Ilden and Amyl regarded Fail with sorrow-filled eyes. The longer they looked at her, the more apparent it became. “You’re his sister,” Fail told Ilden.

  Ilden wound more of her bandages off, and as her head was freed her hair fell and spilled down her back in a cascade of dull brown, the same dull brown that swept over Amyl’s brow in a sweaty clump. Neither sibling said another word, but Amyl moved imperceptibly closer to Ilden’s side.

  “Don’t hurt yourselves on my account,” Fail urged them. “Take Zen, go home, go be safe.”

  Amyl’s hand on the back of Fail’s neck got there too quick for her to pull way. His mouth was on hers, and she melted a little, molding her body to his for one brief instant. “Thank you,” she whispered, leaning her forehead against his. “I might have died without ever being kissed.”

  “You won’t die,” Amyl said. “You’re the angel.”

  Fail stepped back, holding onto Amyl’s hand until she had to let go. “I already told your sister, I’m not an angel.”

  Without another glance backward, Fail turned and headed for the citadel, her cat purring on her shoulder.

  ALTER EGO

  With my hand on the lever, I take one last gulp of precious air before flinging the panel up. The rushing, hissing sound fills my ears, and then just as I open my eyes wider to take in the beauty of the stars, I feel pulled, pushed, sucked, and beaten all at once. Full, inky blackness saturates my field of vision, and I lose consciousness.

  When it finally dawned on me what to do, I was calm. Not the pre-occupied, lethargic calmness that I used to fake, but actual happiness. This time I had a plan, and it worked perfectly.

  The hardest part was pretending with Jennifer. She was the only one who ever filtered through my haze, even a little bit. I had to actually lie to her, which I’d never done before. “When will you be back?” she asked before I boarded.

  “In eight days.”

  She waved. I smiled. Eight days from now, I thought, will be the worst day of her life. But because my pain was greater than my love for her, I went ahead.

  This is something I didn’t expect. My extremities feel prickly, tingly. My eyelids are still heavy and refuse to open. Technically, this is not part of the plan. Thirty minutes go by. I drift back to something like sleep. I dream of being home. I dream of a trip I always wanted to take but never did, to the ancient ruins in the countryside. Only a three-hour drive from the city, but I never went. And then I wake up for good, struggling to get the eyes open, get the body moving again. Finally, with much effort, I see.

  A sunset, glowing intense amber, red, and purple, dark colors against a clear sky. The half-circle sun is a flame at the horizon. Its rays reflect in the pale sand that reaches as far as I can see. I’m sitting on this sand. I touch it, and it’s not grains but a soft, yielding material that only resembles sand. There’s a quality about each grain that reminds me of rice or bubbles. Dotting the landscape are deciduous trees, oaken and solid, green leaves dappled with the last bits of the day’s light, trunks looking green also, as if covered by a thick, furry moss. Far away, beyond a series of dunes, I see a darker mass of ground. As the sun continues to set, it’s hard to tell what this is. As I try to stand, getting my balance and stabilizing my thin, rubbery legs, I look all the way around in every direction. The same beige ground, the same few trees everywhere I look, except for that strange place in the distance. I hear a light wind and feel its breeze. I start to walk.

  When I was little, my mother used to tell me about the night I was born. A cliché dark and stormy night it was, the midwife tense because of my mother’s medical conditions. My father had been assigned the task of noting the time of birth, but when asked later if he’d checked his watch, he claimed he’d forgotten in the confusion of the moment. It was my older brother, ten at the time, who said he heard the church bell tower strike thirteen at the exact moment my first infant wail sounded through the house.

  As night cloaks itself tighter around this unfamiliar terrain, just like a desert, it grows colder and colder. I am not dressed properly. My uniform is a one-piece jumpsuit, material designed to be aerodynamic but not particularly warm. To stave off the chill, I try to run, but I can only do so a short distance as weakness overtakes me. This has been a long trip, and I can’t remember when I last ate. I am perhaps even truly sick. Pushing my body beyond its limits seems a bad idea, and so I wrap my arms around myself and hunch my shoulders against the wind. I can no longer make out details in the distance, now that it’s dark. No moon rises to help me see my way. I begin to feel dizzy. If I freeze to death in the night...well, that would be closer to what I had intended in the first place.

  I went through the motions of a proper life with Jennifer. We danced and drank and made love. She was the only one I ever sang to, and she wrote me tender little poems that she left in odd places all over the house for me to happen upon. I loved her, but she was also one of the people from whom I most needed to get away. If I had stayed much longer, the thought of all the other things I would have been expected to go through with to behave normally were just too horrible.

  It is much warmer when I wake up, and the sky is a bright and clear blue. The ground seems lighter and more yellow than it looked last night. I’m much closer to my destination. Finding out what that actually is proves frightening, though. For some inexplicable reason, while walking last night, I had assumed that this place was uninhabited. Now, as I stand a few yards away from a series of constructed buildings, all oddly shaped but clearly built by sentient minds and able hands, I know this assumption is false. There are at least six structures, rounded buildings with holes for doors and windows, all arranged around a larger, taller building made from stone, not dirt and wood as the others are. The sweeping tiers of tapered cones towards the top of the edifice make me think of a castle.

  When my brother came down with pneumonia, he strung himself up by his belt, dangling his ravaged body off the rod in the tiny, institutional closet in his tiny, institutional room. Father treated his death as the chance to turn me into everything a person should be, hence all the trouble and pressure and classes. I wanted to be more like my brother, the way he could’ve been without the voices in his head and the tremors in his hands. In Father’s view, it was creative thinking that turned my brother into a crying wreck locked in the fetal position under the kitchen table, never mind that it was our parents’ genes that had created his psychosis in the first place.

  The day wears on longer than I think it should, and the castle gets farther away the closer I get to it. Crossing a distance of a few yards shouldn’t take hours. A tree is very near, and I stumble against it, my head swimming. I slide to the ground, a pile of bones and blistered skin. My uniform feels dusty, and my fingernails have brown, gritty clusters of dirt collecting under the tips. My teeth feel porous and fuzzy to the touch of my papery tongue. I shut my eyes. The skin around my eyelids is tight and uncomfortable. I try to sink my body into the ground as if it were a springy, yielding mattress. I do not sleep, but feel the warmth of the day drain from the golden ground as the sun slips away.

  I feel rested and better after a time, the coolness of the night wind soothing my pains, and I wobble to my feet.

 
; I once went without sleep for four days. I began to get a blistering headache after twenty-eight hours, but that went away sometime later on the second day. Hallucinations came, subtle and inoffensive. I laughed as though drunk. On the third day I was able to do little else than sit and smoke cigarettes. Jennifer tried to entertain me, playing gin and watching films, but when she asked how long I planned to do this, I just shrugged. I would watch her sleep, envious, but unwilling to give in myself. Finally, my body betrayed me, and I jolted upright from the floor to find I’d passed out for several hours. I slid beside Jennifer in the bed and felt her stir but pretended to pass out. She stroked my hair. I longed to be able to find the gesture pleasant.

  The castle seems much taller, a dark monolith reaching for the sky. The stone is a deep slate grey, solid and bleak. I look hard, squeezing my eyes nearly shut, to try to make out a door. It’s hard to see in the pre-dawn haze. Near the corner, I feel a section of the wall nudge. I peer closer and see a crack in the stone and can almost make out dim light behind it. I move my hands around that side and discover a deeper depression, slightly smaller than my hand. I put my fist into it and push. The door does not open, but I feel movement and grinding, as if there is some obstacle on the other side. In my tired, hungry mind, something occurs to me, and I move the door the opposite way, pulling it. With a groan, the heavy stone spins away from its arch, and I walk inside.

  From deeper in the building, a form emerges, silent and dark, surrounded by heavy robes. It pauses when it catches sight of me. A weak voice calls out a greeting. I stop, standing still. The robes draw back from the creature and fall to the ground to reveal the figure in more regal posture. It has pale skin and is tall and thin with long, silvery hair. I cannot tell its sex. Its eyes are sharp and intense. It regards me coldly, but with a hint of curiosity.

  “Who are you?” The voice is far more hoarse and reedy than I thought it would be, given its regal image.

  “You speak my language?”

  “Of course.” Then a glint of recognition flashes behind its eyes. “I know you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Your future or your past,” comes the reply. “Your choice.” In a fit of coughing and a cloud of dust, the figure falls to the ground, motionless, withering, turning to a shrunken skeleton before my eyes. I begin to weep.

  I buried the creature I came to think of as the royal head and sole subject of this desolate land. I buried it under a tree, muttering words over the small grave. I moved into its home, took over its life, and became something other than just a visitor.

  I learned to create my subjects, my summoned children who appeared before me to run through the structures I erected up and around the castle. If they found their way out again, they left. If they didn’t, they were mine.

  And then, eventually, I created one who looked familiar. Raven hair. A dim memory of my wife slid through my mind, and I found myself hoping this child would stay. “I love you,” I told her. And she smiled brilliantly, her eyes and teeth like stars leading the way back home.

  The ankou

  The jazz quartet sounded very drunk to most folks in the bar, but not to Aaron. He was practically crawling on the sticky floor, and to his numb ears the band was positively zipping through their rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”

  I have got to vomit now, he thought. The best place to go was the alley, which was fine. The room had become claustrophobic, and the idea of getting a blast of wintry wind in his face sounded heavenly.

  The front steps were crumbling. As he swayed out the door, Aaron tried to stay vertical, but the ice, the snow, the bits of decades-old pavement no longer attached properly… There was a banging sound somewhere, then another, and then the first flash of pain rumbling through the young man.

  Then darkness.

  When it lifted, Aaron was clearheaded for the first time all night. Instant sobriety, no apparent hangover. Handy. He breathed in and out, luxuriating in the cool air. As he drifted past the storefronts along the sidewalk, he felt good, light, happy.

  Until he noticed that the karate center on the corner looked wrong. It had a red awning, it did, so why did the fabric look grey now? Grey like… the traffic lights. And the last few people left out on the streets. Black, white, various shades of grey, like watching a black-and-white film. What the hell?

  Like something out of a cartoon, a figure was suddenly looming over Aaron on the sidewalk, a figure in a black hooded cloak, a scythe in one skeletal hand.

  “Fuck, I’m dead?” Aaron demanded.

  The hood drew back, the bony hand melted into flesh, and the figure shrank several feet. “And I am way, way glad, too!” chirped a young woman. She grinned at him and thrust the scythe into his hand. “Twelve months, your turn!”

  And then she was gone in a flash of white light, leaving Aaron clad in a very unflattering robe.

  The Apple Box

  It all went to hell in Westport.

  Lucy hadn’t realized how much she thrived on traffic, on people, on brown skies and buildings and nightclubs—proper nightclubs, not the smoke- and sweat-filled lounges she got dragged to in summer vacation villages. She longed for bustle and big bands and travel to places more exotic than the Catskills. In Westport, raccoons rummaged through the trash every night, and she spent her days desperate and alone, her dreams and adventures behind her.

  At night in Westport, she didn’t hear horns honk and music wafting upstairs from a ragtime piano bar. All she heard was soft snoring, summer night insects, and those damned raccoons. Some nights, there was no snoring, and those were the nights she knew her once-fiery husband Ricky was drowning his sorrows in a bottle of rum or the curves of one of his back-up singers. The mornings after those no-snoring nights, she’d find him singing “Dos Gardenias” as he made breakfast in the roomy kitchen of the suburban monstrosity they now silently shared. His son would teeter in, less steady on his feet with every passing year, less communicative and less gleeful.

  Like mother, like child.

  It was Ethel’s idea to go back to the city for a “girls’ weekend.” Her husband Fred was visiting army buddies—

  I suspect one of ‘em was more than a buddy, if ya know what I mean, Ethel had once drunkenly confided. The man just doesn’t like to touch me, and I’ve been reading up on things, things I suspected back even as far as the vaudeville days. He used to be awfully chummy with the sword swallower.

  —and Ricky was off again, a gig in the Poconos, playing for naïve young honeymooners, cuckolding the husbands before they’d been married a week.

  “Let’s go to all the sad little tourist traps the natives don’t hit,” Ethel suggested. “Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, all of it.”

  Lucy shrugged and moped and let herself be dragged to a hotel filled with noisy young musicians, an Italian restaurant with remarkable sorbets, and the fur counter at Macy’s. As they pondered how to spend the first day’s happy hour, Lucy paused by a storefront near the Village.

  MADAME POMME CAN MAKE YOUR FUTURE

  “Can she now?” Lucy mused aloud. She laughed and lit a cigarette. “I’m forty years old, my husband won’t divorce me, and my son—” She stopped and swallowed back a sob. “I have no future.”

  Ethel frowned and put her arm around Lucy’s shoulders. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Because it’s embarrassing or because it’s the truth?” Lucy didn’t wait for an answer before sauntering into the shop.

  A woman in a blue velvet cape stepped out from behind a curtain. She was tall, regal, and pale, with deeply red lips. Her hair was covered with a heavy black veil, and a small gold band circled her forehead.

  “Madame Pam, I presume?” Lucy asked.

  “Pomme,” the woman corrected.

  Lucy leaned forward and pursed her lips. “Poh-m,” she tried. She shook her head and waved a hand at the woman. “I’ll never get it.” She squared her shoulders and stood up straighter. “I would like one new future, please. How much?”
r />   Madame Pomme lifted one pencil-thin eyebrow. “You are desperate, child. This first one shall be free.” She reached across the glass top of the store counter and slid a small wooden box over to Lucy. It was low and shallow, the sort of thing that could hold fancy cigars. “Do not open this until the next time your husband sleeps beside you. Inside is your future. You will know what to do.”

  Lucy glanced sideways at Ethel. “Um, okay.” She gave a low whistle and lifted two fingers to her forehead in a little salute to the woman. “Thank you very much, I suppose.”

  Ethel tugged at Lucy’s sleeve, pulling her out of the shop.

  “Sorry, that was a bit off the beaten path,” Lucy said. “Come on, Ethel. Drinks anyplace you like.”

  She forgot all about the box through the rest of the trip, leaving it at the bottom of her suitcase. Unpacking on her first night back in Connecticut, her pale fingers slid across its carved surface. She withdrew it and studied the lid. Swirled slices had been gouged into the wood, leaving it festooned with tiny apples sprinkled across leafy vines. The work was extraordinary. Lucy placed it on the top of her dresser, and it landed with a hollowly thud.

  Empty, I knew it. I can use it for jewelry, at least.

  But then as Ricky snored across the room, she remembered Madame Pomme’s words and got up to open the box.

  Inside were swaths of dark blue velvet, nestled around a slim, silver dagger.

  You will know what to do.

  Lucy glanced over at Ricky’s sleeping form.

  She slid from her bed again, the dagger in hand, and went outside. Just as she suspected, there was a fat silver cylinder on its side—the trash can was tipped over again. The yard was filled with furious rustling.