P. Parrish - South Of Hell

She dropped the backpack to the floor and moved slowly down a narrow hallway. It led to a small room with faded green wallpaper peeling away in damp layers. The next room was like the first but with yellow flowered paper, most of it in piles on the scuffed wood floor. A third room had light fixtures dangling bare wires and more moldering walls shedding their paper skins.

She stood in the center of the third room, a cold draft swirling around her. It felt like the house itself was moving around her and she was inside it, inside its heart, inside the heart of a dying animal.

Voices.

Where were they coming from? They had always been inside her head before, but now…

Outside her head now. Like they were just a step away in the next room. She went to the front of the house.

Another small room, this one with blue-patterned wallpaper and yellowed lace curtains. The voices were loud here, louder than the usual whisper. And they were-

She turned.

There, in the far corner, she saw it, a small upright piano, dark wood under a gray coat of dust, the top heaped with long, thin boxes.

The voices, so loud here, the same ones that came to her when she slept. She had never been able to make out what they were saying. But now…

She stared at the piano.

Suddenly, she could hear them perfectly. The voices were singing!

Catch Don set a seal

Oh do you know so sweet

You and me, Pearl, no matter hurt.

New rips in two in stormy. Sue lures while

You pray on guard all day trembling a while.

The sting of tears in her eyes. The voices were real. She hadn’t been crazy, she hadn’t made them up. Those voices that always came to her in her dreams. They were real, and they were singing real words. The words made no sense, but she didn’t care. The words were real, and so was this place, and so was she.

You and me, Pearl, no matter hurt.

She shut her eyes tight. The voices were getting louder.

You and me, Pearl, no matter hurt

You and me Pearl no matter hurt

youandmepearlnomatterhurt

hurt hurt hurt

hurt hurt hurt!

Suddenly, a loud bang. It felt like the floor was moving beneath her feet, like the walls were moving inward. She bolted from the room.

Another bang. Just thunder, just thunder. But it propelled her forward.

She was back in the kitchen. Rain was beating on the small window over the old sink. Or was the beating sound in her head? She couldn’t tell anymore, because something bad was happening. Something was rising up inside her, worse than anything she had felt before, something bad beyond her heart when it beat too fast and beyond her skin when it grew slick with sweat and beyond her head when the voices shouted.

This place, this room. Something bad here.

A boom of thunder. She clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes.

But she could still see it, see it playing on the curtain of her lids. Red. So much red. A thick flow of red everywhere.

Run! Run! Run, Amy! Run! Hide!

She opened her eyes.

The cupboard. There, in the corner, near the sink.

She dropped to her knees, her fingers grasping the rusted handle. The door opened, and she crawled inside. She pulled the door closed and pressed into the dark corner. Tried to make herself small, smaller, smallest until she disappeared.

She started to cry.

Then. Then…

A whisper. That one soft voice that sometimes found her in her dreams, rising out of the screeches of the others, coming to her in this dark place now, soft around her like a blanket.

You and me, no matter how hurt

You and me you and me

The other voices faded away. The banging stopped. It was quiet. The invisible blanket was still there, holding her.

You got kin here?

She hugged her knees and rocked herself in the dark.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, yes, yes.”

They had been down this road before. They had been down it so many times that even with the night as dark as it was, even without the blue wash of a moon above or the yellow glow from a house nearby to help light their way, they knew where they were going.

Still, Louis had the feeling something was different this time.

“You okay?” he asked.

The tall man walking by his side didn’t answer.

“Mel?”

“Yeah.” A clearing of his throat, like the crunching of the gravel under their shoes. “Yeah… yeah. I’m fine.”

Louis didn’t look over at his friend, didn’t have to. He knew Mel Landeta was lying. Something had been bothering him all night. Louis sensed it from the moment they sat down to eat at Timmy’s Nook. The talk over grouper sandwiches and beer had been of the usual stuff: the Miami Heat’s seven-game skid, cop gossip from O’Sullivan’s, and how Louis had spent the last week sitting outside a Fort Myers motel so some guy could prove his wife was cheating on him.

When the small talk and beers had run out, Mel had gone mute. And now, as they walked the dark stretch of road back to Louis’s cottage, his quiet hung heavy in the cool April air.

“Mel, what’s on your mind?” Louis asked finally.

A long pause. “Lizards,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me, lizards.”

“Mel, if you don’t want to talk-”

“I’m serious. I was thinking about the lizard I saw out on your porch. It had no tail.”

“The cat probably got it,” Louis said.

Mel was quiet for a moment. “Lizards can grow their tails back. Do you know that?”

Louis shook his head slowly, knowing Mel couldn’t see it.

“Lizards, sponges, starfish, even worms. They can all regrow their body parts,” Mel said.

They walked on, slowly.

“And newts,” Mel said. “You poke out a newt’s eye, and you know what happens? He grows a new eye. So that’s what I have been thinking about. How come a fucking newt can grow a new eye and fucking scientists can’t figure out why a fucking human being can’t?”

A car rounded the bend ahead of them, and Louis blinked in the glare of the headlights. They waited on the sandy shoulder until it passed.

“How about one more beer before I drive you back?” Louis said.

“I guess one more won’t kill me,” Mel said.

When they got to the low dune that fronted the cottage, Louis put a hand on Mel’s arm and guided him across the dark yard. Mel stood on the screened-in porch until Louis flicked a light on in the living room.

“You live like a pig, Kincaid,” Mel said.

“I just cleaned this morning,” Louis said, going to the refrigerator.

“Dirty socks and cat poop. Get some air freshener.”

Louis brought two Heinekens back. Mel took one and folded his long body down onto the sofa. Louis flopped into the chair opposite, watching Mel. He hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks. Still, theirs was an old-marriage kind of friendship, where long pauses in conversation were left unfilled and long times apart needed no rebuilt bridges. It was the kind of friendship where one man knew when to walk a wide berth around the other. But this, Louis sensed, was not one of those times.

“Your eyes bothering you?” Louis asked.

Mel was holding the beer bottle against his forehead. “I already gave up driving. Maybe I’ll give up walking next.”

Louis took a long pull from the beer. The silence lengthened. Finally, Louis picked up the remote and flicked on the TV but kept the volume off. Miami Vice was on. Louis watched Sonny steer a speeding Cigarette boat down the Intracoastal, the boat’s fishtail wake sparkling against the pastel blur of hotels. Louis noticed Mel was staring at the TV, but he knew his friend couldn’t make out any of the details. Mel had been battling retinitis pigmentosa for almost ten years now, and he saw life as if through a plastic shower curtain. That was how Mel once described it — when he talked about it, which wasn’t often.