Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

“Why not?”

He paused, his eyes lifting briefly to the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. “You still don’t seem … I don’t know. Yourself.”

“And what would that be like?” She had not touched her food, except to prod it the way a child pokes a stick at roadkill. It cooled on the plate in front of her, congealing cheese and oils. It made her sick.

His mood swung abruptly into something more withdrawn and depressed; she could watch his face and see it happen. This made her feel better. This was more like the man she had known for the past several years of their marriage.

“Am I a prisoner here?”

He finally looked at her, shocked and hurt. “What? How could you even say that?”

She said nothing. She just held his gaze.

He looked terrified. “I’m just worried about you, babe. You don’t — you’re not—”

“You mean this?” She raised her left arm and slipped her finger into the open wound. It was as clean and bloodless as rubber.

Sean lowered his face. “Don’t do that.”

“If you’re really worried about me, why don’t you take me to the hospital? Why didn’t you call an ambulance? I’ve been sleeping so much the past few days. But you just go on to work like everything’s fine.”

“Everything is fine.”

“I don’t think so.”

He was looking out the window now. The sun was going down and the light was thick and golden. Their garden was flowering, and a light dusting of pollen coated the left side of their car in the driveway. Sean’s eyes were unblinking and reflective as water. He stared at it all. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said.

Silence filled the space between them as they each sat still in their own thoughts. The refrigerator hummed to life. Katie finally pushed herself away from the table and headed toward the door, scooping up the car keys on her way.

“I’m going out,” she said.

“Where?” His voice was thick with resignation.

“Maybe to the store. Maybe no where. I’ll be back soon.”

He moved to stand. “I’ll come with.”

“No thanks,” she said, and he slumped back into his chair.

Once, she would have felt guilty for that. She would have chastised herself for failing to take into account his wishes or his fears, for failing to protect his fragile ego. He was a delicate man, though he did not know it, and she had long considered it part of her obligation to the marriage to accommodate that frailty of spirit.

But she felt a separation from that now. And from him too, though she remembered loving him once. If anything inspired guilt, it was that she could not seem to find that love anymore. He was a good man, and deserved to be loved. She wondered if the ghost of a feeling could substitute for the feeling itself.

But worse than all of that was the separation she felt from herself. She’d felt like a passenger in her own body the last three days, the pilot of some arcane machine. She watched from a remove as the flesh of her hand tightened around the doorknob and rotated it clockwise, setting into motion the mechanical process that would free the door from its jamb and allow it to swing open, freeing her avenue of escape. The flesh was a mechanism too, a contracting of muscle and ligament, an exertion of pull.

There’s nothing wrong with you , he’d said.

She opened the door.

The light was like ground glass in her eyes. It was the most astonishing pain she had ever experienced. She screamed, dropped to the floor, and curled into herself. Very distantly she heard something heavy fall over, followed by crashing footsteps that thrummed the floor beneath her head, and then the door slammed shut. Her husband’s hands fell on her and she twisted away from them. The light was a paste on her eyes; she couldn’t seem to claw it off of them. It bled into her skull and filled it like a poisonous radiation. She lurched to her feet, shouldering Sean aside, and ran away from the door and into the living room, where she tripped over the carpet and landed hard on her side. Her husband’s hysterical voice followed her, a blast of panic. She pushed her body forward with her feet, wedged her face into the space beneath the couch, the cool darkness there, and tried to claw away the astounding misery of the light.

That night she would not come to bed. They’d been sleeping beside each other since the suicide, though he was careful to keep space between them and had taken to wearing pajamas to bed. She slept fitfully at night, seeming to rest better in the daylight, and this troubled his own sleep, too. She would be as still as stone and then struggle elaborately with the sheets for a few moments before settling into stillness again, like a drowning woman. He turned his head toward the wall when this happened. And then he would remember that he’d turned away from her that night, too. And he would stay awake into the small hours, feeling her struggle, knowing that he’d missed his chance to help her.

The incident at the door had galvanized him, though. Her pain was terrifying in its intensity, and it was his fault. He would not let his guilt or his shame prevent him from doing whatever was necessary to keep her safe and comfortable from now on. Love still lived in him, like some hibernating serpent, and it stirred now, it tasted the air with its tongue.

It took her some time to calm down. He fixed her a martini and brought it to her, watched her sip it disinterestedly as she sat on the couch and stared at the floor, her voice breaking every once in a while in small hiccups of distress. Long nail marks scored her skin; her right eye seemed jostled in its orbit, angled fractionally lower than the other. He had drawn the curtains and pulled the blinds, though by now the sun had sunk and the world outside was blue and cool. He turned off all but a few lights in the house, filling it with shadows. Whether it was this, or the vodka, or something else that did it, she finally settled into a fraught silence.

He eased himself onto the couch beside her, and he took her chin in his fingers and turned her face toward him. An echo of his thought from the night of the suicide passed through his mind: she will never get better .

He felt his throat constrict, and heat gathered in his eyes.

“Katie?” He put his hand on her knee. “Talk to me, babe.”

She was motionless. He didn’t even know if she could hear him.

“Are you all right? Are you in any pain?”

After a long moment, she said, “It was in my head.”

“What was?”

“The light. I couldn’t get it out.”

He nodded, trying to figure out what this meant. “Well. It’s dark now.”

“Thank you,” she said.

This small gratitude caused an absurd swelling in his heart, and he cupped her cheek in his hand. “Oh baby,” he said. “I was so scared. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what to do for you.”

She put her own hand over his and pressed her cheek into his palm. Her eyes remained unfocused though, one askew, almost as if this was a learned reaction. A muscle memory. Nothing more.

“I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said. “Everything is strange.”

“I know.”

She seemed to consider something for a moment. “I should go somewhere else,” she said.

“No,” Sean said. A violence moved inside him, the idea of her leaving calling forth an animal fury, aimless and electric. “No, Katie. You don’t understand. They’ll take you away from me. If I take you somewhere, if I take you to see someone, they will not let you come back. You just stay here. You’re safe here. We’ll keep things dark, like you like it. We’ll do whatever it takes. Okay?”