Scott Nicholson - Head cases

"Huh?"

She put her arm across his chest, afraid he'd leave. She scolded herself for being so dumb. If David left, she'd be alone again when darkness fell. Alone with the beggar.

David kissed her on the forehead. "Ocean eyes like ice cream," he said.

She tensed beside him, sticky from the body contact. "Did you hear that?"

"What?"

"Under the bed. A noise."

"I don't hear anything." David made a show of checking the clock on her dresser.

The soft choking sound came again, the painful drawing of an inhuman breath. The beggar stirred, fingers creeping like thick worms across the floor. He was angry, jealous. Cynthia should not have brought another man to this bed. Cynthia belonged to the beggar, and always had.

"He's coming," she said.

David sat up and looked at the door. "Damn. Why didn't you tell me you had a boyfriend?"

"Only crazy people talk to mirrors."

David reached off the bed, grabbed his clothes, and began dressing. " You're crazy, Alice."

"Who's Alice?"

David ignored her, teeth clenched in his rush to pull up his pants. "I hope to hell he doesn't carry a gun."

"Shhh. He'll hear you."

David slipped his arms into his jacket. Now he was Army Jacket again, just another one of them, a hollow man, a mound of dust surrounding a bag of air. None of them were real.

Except the man under the bed.

Army Jacket struggled into his shoes. Cynthia leaned forward and watched, wondering how far the beggar would let Army Jacket get before pulling him into the velvet.

"Green licorice. Frightened of storms?" Army Jacket asked, his breath shallow and rapid.

"No, only of him."

"Razor in the closet since yesterday." Army Jacket tiptoed out of the room, paused at the front door and listened.

"He doesn't use the door," Cynthia called out, giggling. The beggar would slide out from under the bed any moment now, shake of the accumulated dust of his long sleep, and make Army Jacket go away.

The phone rang. It had to be Mom. Seven rings before Mom gave up.

Army Jacket swallowed, twisted the knob, and yanked the door open, falling into a defensive crouch. The hallway was empty.

"Allergies," he yelled at her, then slipped out the doorway and disappeared.

Cynthia fell back on the pillows, sweat gathering on her brow. The beggar hadn't taken him. The beggar had not been jealous. The beggar was too confident, too patient, to be jealous.

She clutched the blankets as the afternoon sun sank and the shadows grew long on the bedroom wall. She should have fled while it was still light, but her limbs were limp as sacks of jelly. Fleeing was useless, anyway. He'd always had her.

Dusk came, dangling its gray rags, shaking lint over the world.

Under the bed, stirrings and scratches.

Under the bed, breathing.

Cynthia whimpered, curled into a fetal position, nude and burning and vulnerable. Waiting, like always.

The hand scrabbled along the side of the mattress. It clutched the blankets and began dragging the body that wore it from the vague ether. Cynthia closed her eyes, tight like she had as a small child, so tight the tears pressed out. She trembled, her sobs in rhythm with the horrible rasping of the beggar's breath.

She could feel it looming over her now, its legs formed, the transition from dust back to flesh complete. Cynthia held her breath, the last trick. Maybe if she could hold her breath forever…

The hand touched her gently. The skin was soft, soft as velvet.

Cynthia almost screamed. But she knew what would happen if she screamed. Because Mommy might hear and things like this are secret and it's okay to touch people who love you but some people wouldn't understand. Bad girls who scream have to be punished. They have to be sent into the dark place under the bed.

And they have to stay under the bed until Daddy says it's okay to come out.

So Cynthia didn't scream, even as the hand ran over her skin, leaving a trail of dust.

She didn't make a sound as the beggar climbed onto the bed. If she was a good little girl, then the beggar would go away after he finished, and wouldn't drag her into the underthere.

The dust settled over her, a smothering blanket of velvet.

If only she could hold her breath forever.

“There is no poetry in death,” Mrs. Tanser said. “Only loss and rot, stink and waste. I never could understand those gothic romantics who celebrate the dark and lust after the cycle of decay.”

The little girl in front of her didn’t say a thing, but nodded creamy, unblemished cheeks as if she understood.

“I suppose that doesn’t make much sense to you,” Mrs. Tanser continued, running a powder-coated finger up the girl’s cheek. “You came here hoping to sell cookies and to visit my nieces, and here I am talking to you about death! But I can’t deny death, mind you. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing.”

The older woman laughed, and stood up from the table. Her plate of thinly sliced apples remained untouched, uneaten, the brown creep of time already shadowing the fruit. The girl’s plate, however, glistened with the juice of apple long gone.

Mrs. Tanser ground a pestle into a tall bucket that squeaked and shifted on the counter as she worked.

“Well, I'm sorry my nieces Genna and Jillie aren’t here any longer. They only came for a visit, so I'm glad you got to meet them. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to be with them again soon. But I talk too much and time passes. Too fast, too fast. Eat my apples dear. Waste not, want not.”

The plate slid across the table. Mrs. Tanser raised a silver eyebrow as it did.

“You are afraid of this house, aren’t you?”

The child nodded, slowly. Her eyes were blue and wide, and the reflection of the older woman’s methodic grinding and pummeling of the substance in the bucket glimmered like a ghost in their mirror.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised. Quite the reputation it has. I didn’t realize that when I moved in, but now it makes sense what a steal it was. I knew there was something wrong when the realtor quoted me the price-you could see it in her face. She was afraid, that silly woman was, not that she knew why. A beautiful old mansion like this, perched on the top of the most scenic hill in town? I have to admit, I didn’t care what was wrong with it-for that price, I thought, I could fix it. And then I moved in, and started teaching down at Barnard Elementary, and I found out why that girl was scared. You know, she wouldn’t even walk into the house past the front foyer?”

Mrs. Tanser laughed. The pestle clinked against the top of the bucket, and a hazy cloud puffed from the opening like blown flour.

“The one warning that woman said to me was, ‘You know, it’s a bad place for children.’ I didn’t even ask why. ‘I don’t have any,’ I told her. That shut her up. Or maybe it didn’t, I didn’t care. I walked up those gorgeous oak stairs that wind out of the living room and up to the boudoir. I wanted to see it all, with or without her help. She didn’t come with me.”

Mrs. Tanser stopped her grinding then and considered. “Would you like to see the upstairs?” she asked.

The little girl shrugged, and the older woman dropped the pestle.

“That settles it. Genna and Jillie aren't here, but I can still show you the house. Come on upstairs. I’m going to show you the most beautiful four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen. The girls loved it! It may be the only four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen.”

The girl rose from the table, hands held straight at the sides of her red and green striped skirt. She wanted to leave, felt embarrassed that she'd been coaxed into staying somehow. Her freckles threatened to burst into flame as she waited for Mrs. Tanser to wash her hands in the sink.