Light is a Doorway - A horror story (that you should already be reading)

1.

Halford stood in the shadow of the old house. He wondered how long he’d have to carry Jane inside of him, see his memories of her out there in the world like shrieking, pointing reflections. Here was a sunlit rooftop, and yet he saw only the mountains of Julian, Lake Cuyamaca girded by reeds, the California sun gilding a field of tawny grass surrounding a lone picnic table. And there upon it, the both of them, sucking the air from each other like fire.

Boone Talard came up beside him, tools clanging in a five gallon bucket. “Upstairs is the plan, I’m thinking. The floorboards are old as shit. No screws. Pry bar and a clawhammer oughtta do. Got your brace on?” 

Halford tapped the nylon backbrace under his overalls.

Boone nodded. “Well, I ain’t paying you to stare.”

2.

“Most of it’s been cleared,” Alex Garvon was saying. “The contractor told us the pipes were mostly in the center, there, so we pushed it to the sides. We haven’t been able to clear all her things just yet. It’s a real nightmare.”

This was easy work, the way they’d been doing it two years now. Shadowing competitors as they drove through Los Angeles to make bids. And stepping on the property minutes later to undercut it by fifteen percent.

“I don’t know how you can make money with a bid like that,” Alex Garvon said, standing back in the attic now, near the stairs. “You’re both Americans. No migrants, I hope. I don’t support companies that hire illegal help.”

“I’ve got a tag on my ass says ‘Made in the USA’.” Boone smiled, bad teeth, bad breath, a fucking wolf smile. “So does Halford, here. Been doing this for years. Contractors spread themselves thin, see. Hire too many specialists, too much pay, insurance, the list goes on. We’re all about limiting overhead. Choose a craft and master it. You want walls, call someone else. You want carpentry, I know a guy. But you want your place re-piped, Boone Talard is your man.”

“I see.” Garvon looked relieved, then sad again, roving the dusty artifacts, boxes, mirrors, Victorian furniture. “All this stuff…”

He locked Halford with his tortured puppy eyes. “It still doesn’t feel right. Her just disappearing. Then all of us having to wait around for the courts to declare her…” He swallowed that last part. “Look, I’ll be available on my cell if you need me. I’m thirty minutes away. Just call. Anything, just call, okay?”

Halford nodded.

When Garvon’s footsteps disappeared, Boone spat on the floor. “Don’t support illegals? Every piece’a fruit mixed in his smoothies’s prolly palmed by a spick. All the cooks in his fancy restaurants. Some people sew their eyes shut to the truth’a things. It’s how we make money.” He looked at the attic floor. “Now git makin it.”

3.

It took Halford five hours to clear most of the boards. The labor was mindless, freed his brain to chew itself. He ached with the shrapnel of a thousand memories. It wasn’t that Jane had been gorgeous—a simple girl, beautiful in a simple way, but smart, Jesus, enough brain diesel to power a train—it was that she’d leveled the slope of his inconsistencies. Where Halford was weak, Jane had been strong; where he was mindless, she’d been focused. Three years of emotional rehabilitation, and now the limb was gone.

It was like learning to walk again.

Halford jammed the pry bar under another board, levered it. Nails squeaked, the air alive with motes. He paused to watch them in the sunlight, hundreds, maybe thousands. And even those that seemed to verge upon each other were separated by oceans of emptiness.

The quantum level, Jane was saying, at the quantum level there’s no such thing as solidity. It flows, like a river or a wave. Nothing sits still until its observed. She was crawling toward him, red hair spun up in a bun, Halford’s big t-shirt hanging to her knees. Even now, she grabbed him, kissed him, there’s space between us. My warmth is a ghost; your scent, a mirage. Now love me. Love me through the emptiness.

Halford felt like crying. He’d been doing it off and on for three months now. At banal moments. Moments that shouldn’t have meant anything. Brushing his teeth and seeing a stray red hair curled in the corner like it had dragged itself there to die. Being out on a cloudy day and remembering the Sequoias, the long hikes, the sweaty sex and laughter. Even the smell of flowers stirred the ghosts of her perfume—a scent he’d hated because it reminded him of old women. There was no escaping her.

Another board came up. Another.

Why can’t you do something? Jane was saying, Halford hovering in confusion behind her. I mean, just get a hobby.  Believe in something. Why can’t you fish? Or build a shelf? Or read?

He’d told her he would rather be near her, smell her, feel her.

I love you. I do. But sometimes it’s like wearing a sweater when it’s already hot. You smother me. I want to breathe and feel like I can’t. Just let me be alone. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I just have … other loves. Loves we can’t share. Loves you’re not a part of.

Tears were rolling by the time he tried to pry the next board. He leaned into it, wanting to grunt, to loose the strangling pressure.

The snap was so loud and sudden Halford thought he’d cracked a pipe. The ground shifted, carried him forward. He slammed the skeleton of excavated support beams. Bit his tongue. Shit. There was blood in his mouth.

Halford pushed himself off the joists. Spat a pinkish glob onto the cotton candy fiberglass stuffed between each beam. His hip was bruised from where he’d fallen on the bevel of the pry bar. Landed right on it, goddammit.

“What was that?” Boone called from somewhere far below.

“Killed a rat,” Halford said automatically. “Big fucker, too.”

“You wanna be an exterminator, then quit. If you wanna work for me …”

Halford wasn’t listening. He was looking back at the floorboard he thought he’d broken. Only it wasn’t a floorboard—it was several, nailed together in a type of door. What had they called it in the pirate books his father had read him?

A cache.

Halford picked up the pry bar and pulled the wood door up slowly. He ought to be working, knew that, but he was curious, and that in itself was a miracle. Since Jane, his only curiosity had been the idea of suicide or a drunkenness so total it promised synaptic collapse.

But this…

Halford bent to his knees in the dust-smelling cloud. Only here next to the cache, he could smell something woodsy. Like a forest. No. A wetland being baked by heat.

It was three feet wide and five feet tall. With a protective coverage of thick material that felt like hide when he brushed it with his fingers. Whoever’d placed it there under the floor had removed some of the two-by-fours to make it fit. He felt suddenly electrified. Afraid and alive, all at once. Above all, he felt pulled. As if a hook had slipped into his ribcage and drawn him here, slowly, through each day, each week, each month...

All for this.

Halford pulled it out and sniffed. Yes. Woods. Bark. Mud. The oily scent of things crawling inches beneath wet soil. It was a secret smell. Black and crystalline. Light-bending. World-sucking.

“What the hell’s that?” Boone said, behind him.

Halford jerked straight. Noticed at once that the light outside had changed.

“You’ve been up here for over a goddamn hour. Doing what?”

Halford swallowed his confusion and stood up. “Someone hid it in the floor.”

Boone’s eyes narrowed, then went sly. “Hid it?”

“Under a trap door. Like a…” Halford hesitated, knowing it would sound stupid. “A cache.”

“Don’t look like cash to me. Might be it’s worth something, though.” He held out his meaty arms. “Give it here.”

Halford had the absurd impulse to strike him. For one blinding instant he could actually feel cheekbones splintering beneath his knuckles.

Boone ripped the coverlet off in a graceless tug, held the frame in study for about four seconds before his brow curled like a pack of hotdogs. “The fuck was this dumbbell thinking? Whole thing’s crooked.” He scratched at it with a thumbnail, then jerked his hand away. “Damn thing cut me!”

He dropped the painting to the floor and leveled his eyes. “You got till 4:30 to get the rest’a them boards up and those pipes ready. Or you just worked for free.”

4.

The sky was a bruise when Halford pulled back up to the empty house. It looked bigger by night, the yard hemmed in by walls of woven juniper. He killed the headlights, licked his lips as he scanned the neighboring windows. All empty, or faintly lit. People living lives; building dreams or else dying slowly as those dreams evaporated. He wondered how many had suffered the bullet of heartache, if they wandered their vaulted halls and grottos feeling useless and alone. Money solved no problems. Money was a shoestring tourniquet on the severed artery of existence.

He left the engine running, just in case. Crept along riverstone siding, between bushes gone wild. It was right where he’d left it, tucked behind a rusting shed.

The relief that came over him when his fingers brushed the coverlet was warm and instant. His muscles relaxed and something black and powerful dumped into the pipeline of his veins. He floated back down the driveway, wondering what he would do with it, where he would hang it, if he should show it to anyone.

“Mr. Halford, isn’t it?” The voice cold and patient, to his left.

Halford tried to appear calm, squinting up toward the porch. “That’s me.” He opened the truck and stowed the painting, keeping his face impassive.

The lightswitch clicked and Alex Garvon came into focus. His eyes were sharp and wondering. But mostly Halford saw pain. “Did you forget something?”

Halford opened his mouth. But the words stayed in his chest.

Garvon was coming down the stairs now. “I’ve been wondering all day why your bid was so cheap. You get what you pay for, right? My father told me that.” He came around to the truck’s rear door, slow as a cat. “My father killed himself. Did you know that?”

Springs and wenches tightened along Halford’s body. “How could I?”

Garvon opened the door and froze, staring at the covered canvas leaning in the footwell of the truck.

“I found it,” Halford blurted. “Under the floorboards. I didn’t mean to steal it. I would have asked, it’s just... I didn’t think it would be appropriate. My boss, he’s weird like that. I just. I don’t normally...” He went cold and studied his boots. “Please don’t call the police.”

Garvon nodded in counsel with himself. “A thing like this can’t be stolen, Mr. Halford. It belongs to its master. A thing like this must be bought.”

Halford reached for his wallet so fast he bent his thumbnail against his jeans. “Name your price.”

Garvon struggled for a moment. His jaw muscles cramped. “I’m not sure if…” Then he looked at it again. Tortured was the word for what Halford saw there in his eyes. “Five seems a fair price.”

Halford made a quick mental audit. “I’m not sure I could get all that tonight. I could make payments. Or—”

Garvon studied him. “You’re telling me you don’t have five dollars?”

Halford opened his mouth to say a number of things, but none of them would come. He looked at the painting. His painting. And pulled the wrinkled Lincoln from his wallet.

Alex walked back up the stairs, slipping the bill in his jacket. He paused at the door. Looked back. “Now it’s yours, Mr. Halford.”

“You won’t tell Boone, will you?”

Alex shook his head, before turning off the light.

Halford called after him. “Mr. Garvon?”

“Yes.”

“Why’re you in there with all the lights off?”

Another cryptic smile. “Darkness helps me think.  See you tomorrow, Mr. Halford.”

5.

Halford’s apartment was sterile. Bare white plaster. A picture window overlooking an alleyway where he could sometimes hear the grunts of a female entrepreneur making her rent. There was a threadbare couch against one wall. A coffee table stained in a pattern of beer rings. A bamboo rug. The kitchen housed a knife block and coffee maker next to the world’s smallest microwave oven. There was no toaster. Halford didn’t care for toast.

Animal Planet played on the television, a calm English voice narrating as a spider crawled across its web. “The Assassin Bug, Stelonemus bituberus, employs a form of aggressive mimicry, in which it plucks the spider’s web like a street performer, eager for patrons, might pluck at his guitar. The spider believes it has caught prey. And not until the last moment—” Halford paused to watch the insect take the spider in its pincers. “—does it realize it has been tricked, by one of nature’s most brilliant ambush predators.”

Halford set the painting in front of the screen and muted the audio. He sat on the couch, unsure. What did one do with a painting? And why this feeling that his life had somehow changed?

He saw Jane on a stage in his mind then, her pale, unfit body pirouetting against the blackness. Sadness burned the eyes that turned and turned. Bleak and somehow deadened. He imagined her in the city, curled in the armchair of some chic café, wondering about him, his life, his dreams, things once shared. He imagined her watching this. Imagined her eyes tilting up, out into the nothing of stone and steel beyond the café window. The muscles of her face tightening. And the tears. The regret…

Halford smiled. Here was new love. New opportunities. Here was a thing limitless with enchantments.

He pulled the tethers and watched the hide coverlet drop to the floor.

The smell was stronger. Trees and noseums and perfumes sweet with swampy vegetation. He could almost feel the heat. He sat on the floor and stared, stretching an arm to touch it.

The roughness and texture.

The paint so warm it seemed to pulse.

They were the last details he remembered.  

6.

In the dream Halford is blindfolded. His hands are bound, and every few feet a pole jabs his lower back. Mud sucks at his feet; they’re bare and raw and going numb.

The night is alive with drums. Distant voices howl phrases in languages that bear no resemblance to German or Italian or Russian or Latin. They are nonsensical, filled with too many consonants. Halford stops to listen and feels a wave of heat pass near his face. He hears breathing, sloshing, knows at once that someone is moving closer with a torch.

“Sure y’want to be goin on now?” The rasp before him is all Cajun gravel, the breath like rotten meat. “Dat be da’path between the Nightland and Wakin’ world. She a mean thing, Lady Red. Chew’da meat right off ya. You sure, Halford Dabuke? Ain’t too late ta change ya mind.”

Then the pole jams his back and he’s stumbling again, the old voice calling after him, “Be off, then. To your doom.”  The mud is to his ankles now. Roots and stones lacerate his feet. The sensations are distant. As if his body is being driven, translating the world beneath its tires.

“Keep…” IT grunts behind him, “MOVING.”

The mud at his knees now. The pole jabbing too hard, chipping at the vertebrae, weakening his knees.

“Stop it,” he moans. “Stop it. I’m moving.”

“No,” IT whispers. “You sinkin’ in the muds of House Red.”

7.

Halford gasped awake. His back felt broken, throbbing with his heart. He strained his eyes until the room came into focus. Sideways. The hardwood floors appearing as walls from this angle. It was dark outside the window. He’d fallen asleep in the living room. He tried to get up—

Then the painting filled his vision, the darkness of it, all that red.

Halford’s muscles relaxed. His neck went limp. And slowly … the world slipped away.

8.

“Go on.” IT sniffs at Halford’s ear. “Alone.”

“Can’t you come with me?”

ITs rumbling exhalation sounds almost sad. “No. This far. This far is enough.”  

A hiss of severing rope and his hands fall limp. Wet sucking noises retreat into the distance. Halford pulls off his mask, catching the trailing shadow of a creature so large it brushes the crowns of the cypress trees. A tail fastened with chains and beef-hooks drags behind IT, carving wet ditches deep as troughs. Stagnant water pools to fill the creature’s tracks—easily the size of manholes.

Halford squints through the surrounding darkness. He’s standing in a swampy clearing, hemmed in by Spanish Moss. The sound of drums is louder here.

Water splashes and Halford jerks right to see a python slithering through the mud. Pale and yellow, it curves a smooth S in front of him, rearing slowly, lifting like some pale tongue from the earth. Its shovel head is massive, the body thick as a telephone pole.

Halford lifts his hands to fend it off.  “Get! Just g—”   

Its eyes explode with red light. There is force to it; substance. It hits his chest like a fist, drives him off his feet. He slams into the mud, sucking cold air into his lungs. He’s about to scream when he sees it forming through the bloodglow in the air.

He blinks because it is impossible. And yet he is looking at it.

A doorway.

9.

Pounding woke him.

Halford peeled himself from the floor and moaned; his back felt like something had chewed it. The sensation disoriented him. The room rippled. And the smell. Everywhere. Mud. Swamp nectar.

The pounding again, like giants sprinting closer. “Halford, you lazy sonovabitch! Halford! Get up!”

He looked at the painting, almost protectively. Looked back at the door. Boone was screaming now: “Halford, I swear if you don’t open this door, I’m gonna—”

“I’m sick!” Halford clawed himself to his feet and fell back down. Jesus, his back. Was it broken?

“Get sick of unemployment even quicker! Now open up! I ain’t playin’”

The man was a demon. Halford pushed himself back up, tightening his stomach to protect the spine. It felt loose. Broken into pieces. When he finally managed to stand, his forehead was dripping with sweat. He waddled over to the kitchen counter, where his back brace was. Tightened it over the T-shirt.

“HALFORD! You’ve got five seconds ‘til I serve you walkin papers. Five… FOUR…”

Halford opened the door on Two. Saw Boone’s thick face, limned with veins.

“It’s damn near Eleven. We gotta job to do. ”

Halford tried to process this. “Eleven?”

“Right as Christ and twice as angry. Now get your ass in gear.”

“I need a shower,” he said. “I feel like shit.”

“No time.” Boone grabbed a shoulder and yanked him out into the hall. “You got your brace on. Your boots. I’ll drive.”

10.

Alex Garvon stood on the porch, a statue with hooded eyes. Boone glanced up through the windshield and smiled, whispering to Halford through his teeth as he put the car in park. “Just stay here. And let me do the talking.”

The door opened. Slammed.

His back glowed in a light display of pain. Halford leaned forward and jammed his fingers beneath the brace. Tender. Not good. He tried to remember the dream. A swamp. He knew that much. And light. And drums beating like unseen wings. There had been others there with him. He hadn’t seen them, but he’d felt them. Sure. Sentience curling through the trees.

Which had been covered in Spanish Moss. Yes. He was remembering now. Huge billowing sheets that fell to mud as black as oil. He’d been restrained. Blindfolded. And—

Boone slapped the window. “Come on already.”

11.

Pipes. Welds. Braces.

It became his mantra. Drilling anchors. Replacing lengths of rotten wood.

Pipes. Welds. Braces.

Halford struggled through the first hour. Then his back loosened up. The pain settling like syrup across his bones.

He moved through the attic with mechanical efficiency, the sun slanting through motes of dust, slanting further until it finally began to die. Boone refused him a break.  He didn’t care, wasn’t hungry, worked until yesterday’s sweat had been drowned by today’s. Halford fell into a trance. So it was that he found his mind doing what it always did.

Thinking of Jane.

12.

Pork chops were warming in the oven, the table set with two votive candles, burned nearly to their base. Halford sat on the chair nearest the door. Checked his watch again. He didn’t want to be worried. But there it was in his chest anyway, clawing like an animal.

Jane opened the door thirty minutes later. She glanced at the candles without a word. Dropped her yoga mat on the table and stared at the ticking oven, glowing there in the darkness like an eye.   

“How was class?”

She looked up, startled by his voice. “Fine.”

“I made us pork chops.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You just stood in a hundred-and-twenty degrees for two hours.” A glance at his watch. “No, three. What do you mean you’re not hungry?”

“I mean I don’t want a goddamn pork chop. Is that alright with you, father?” She snatched her mat and stomped off, eyes panning like turrets.

For a moment Halford saw through them, right down into her heart.

He stood breathing in the dim light for several minutes, wondering what he’d glimpsed. Or what the pregnant blackness in his gut could mean, chewing holes in everything that, up until this moment, had seemed permanent.

13.

Halford backed away. Looked at the gleaming pipes set fresh in their anchors. The sky beyond the window was purple velvet. Clouds obscured the moon. But he could see it. Struggling to break through. To let the world know it existed.

Halford bent to grab his tools and turned.

Alex Garvon was standing next to him.

Halford shot to his feet, a hand on his chest, the other fist clenched to strike. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.”

“It’s alright to be scared.”

Halford didn’t know what to make of the man’s cryptic smile. “We’ll lay the boards tomorrow. Should be out of your hair by Friday.”

“She’d always wanted to paint.” Garvon stared into the cloudbank, seeming not to hear him. “Ever since she was a little girl.”

Halford said nothing.

“My mother, I mean.” He walked across the exposed joists, touched the covered furniture piled against the walls. “She wanted to create something that couldn’t turn on her. Children are such fickle creatures. A parent never owns them; the role is custodial.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged. “I guess, I’m telling myself. I was a challenge for my mother. But she was a challenge for the world. A driven woman is like a juggernaut; God help the man that stands in her path. My father, my step-father, my second step-father, and finally me. Just me. No sister. No brother. Just this house. And Mother.” 

Garvon’s eyes burned with pain.

“After she’d made all her money, Mother became … withdrawn. I moved to the east coast, tried to start a family. To erase her, I suppose. But lineage is a chain. It wraps us in the places we can’t feel. Drags us deeper into the rut carved by the generations before us. We think we’re changing, in control. But the rut changes us. And so…” he shrugged. “I came back. Found her walking the halls like a ghost. Painting morning and night.”

Halford felt the flesh on his neck go stiff. “The painting was hers?”

 “The painting is its own.”

Halford moved for the stairway. “I’m sorry, but—”

“I wouldn’t do that, just yet.”

Halford stopped. His knees were trembling. The nerves in his back were alive, squirming, biting. “This is … bothering me.”

“Not everything can be pleasant, Mr. Halford.”

 “If the painting’s not hers, who’s is it?”

“Yours.”

“Before it was mine. Who made it?”

“That’s a question I can’t answer.”

“Then what’s your point?”

Garvon shook his head, slow, thoughtful. “She said she found it at an antique road show. But the way she told me, I knew she was lying. I remember it, though. All that red. The house. The way it tilted. My eyes hurt to look at it for too long. There was a name carved into the frame.”

“A name?” Halford tried to think if he’d seen it.

“Mr. Snipp.”

Halford puzzled over the phrase. “Never heard of him.”

“That’s because He’s a legend, Mr. Halford. East Kentucky. According to mountain lore, Mr. Snipp sleeps between the angles. Entering our world when the light is just right. ”

Cold. Everywhere. Halford tried to swallow, almost coughed. “Just right?”

“Light is a doorway, Mr. Halford.”

The dream came in a flood of sensory recall. He saw the pale yellow python rearing up from the mud, the sudden blaze of eyes painting the swamp with crimson light, so bright it had substance; and within in, slowly opening…

Halford dropped the tools. The attic roof tilted on its side. He heard his head slap the floor, but his body was only half here. Entire pieces of it were somewhere else, drifting. He was lighter. Changing.

Garvon stood over him with that awful smile. “She lost her mind. I’ve known that for years. But how she lost it. That part I’m just figuring out.”

“Help…” Halford saw glints of red light behind Garvon’s head.

“The only way you can help is to succeed where she failed.”

“How…?”

“The Painting wants to be finished.”

14.

Halford had been waiting here for an hour, hunkered down in his truck in the parking lot cater-corner from Jane’s yoga studio. The animal in his chest would not rest. Ever since a week ago, since the porkchops. He lit a cigarette, telling himself this was stupid, he was stupid. Telling himself that men secure in their relationship did not resort to such callow tactics.

Class ended an hour later. Women exited in currents of conversation that broke as they eddied into the street. Jane was not among them. Which was fine. She was probably just inside, getting her things together.

Another ten minutes passed. Then another. When the dash clock marked another thirty minutes, his heart was thumping like an engine. Things were occurring to him, snips of evidence and speech, independently innocuous, but incriminating when conjoined. They piled in his mind, linking joints, growing taller. Her late nights. Sudden changes in plans. Her always being tired, not wanting sex, barely kissing him. The lackluster way she groaned when his appetites could no longer be thwarted. Even the smell of her had changed: a chemical trespasser speaking to those sleek and silent engines of biology. It filled him with anger, with fire, with—

“The hell with this.” He kicked the door open—the pulling, quaking force within him so violent now he barely felt the ground.

Halford stormed across the street and through the yoga studio’s doors, half expecting them to explode off their hinges, for the walls to rip apart and beams to come tumbling in a thunder of wood and plaster.

He stood breathing in the silence, groping for his voice, for his pulse, knowing that he must be standing here but still unable to settle this fact into an ordered reality. The lust in the air burned his nostrils. In a real world he wouldn’t be seeing this. In a real world Jane wouldn’t be moaning.

She didn’t look up from the tangle of flesh and sweat and muscle, arms and legs twisting, buttocks flexing with each thrust.

She wailed there on her back like a thing gone mad.

15.

Halford let Garvon help him down the stairs. “My back. I have to rest. My back.”

Garvon measured him, biting his bottom lip. “I’ll call an ambulance. Just sit here.”

Halford collapsed on the couch, the plastic coverlet crackling beneath him. “No.” He reached back and put pressure on his spine. “Just … finish.”

Garvon stood so still he might have been evaporating.

“The painting,” Halford grunted. “What did you mean when you said, ‘she failed?’”

Garvon glanced out the door, where Boone was due back any moment. “You have to understand, I’m not certain of any of this. It’s a theory. Nothing more.”

Halford nodded. “Go on.”

“By the time I got divorced and found myself back in California, Mother was a certifiable recluse. She kept to the attic, stopped bathing, walked around in the same ratty robe, muttering to herself. She’d had two cats when I left. I found them in the kitchen cupboard, Mr. Halford. With an extension cord chaining the handles closed. They’d been dead for months.

“It was only by chance I found the painting. One of the dust sheets slipped off.” Garvon looked up into the past, his upper lip twitching. “I remember I couldn’t stop staring at it. The sky. The way it bruised, then faded into bare yellow canvas at the upper corner. The trees, and ravens whirling at angles that made no sense. I was aware of footsteps—I know that now—but in that moment I wanted to be inside of it. To smell the swamp and feel those leaning red doors against my palms…”

Garvon began to pace. “She tried to stab me with a pair of scissors. Missed my neck by inches and sunk the damn things into the easel. When she cut her fingers on the blade, she just stood there, clutching her wrist, screaming for me to get out, to leave and never come back. I was too horrified to respond. So I left. What else could I do? I still remember her silhouette staring down from the stairs. She was looking at her hand. At all that blood. And she was smiling.”

A wave of chills raked Halford’s back.

“I snuck up stairs one last time just to see it.  In the moonlight. It was a desecration. And, at the same time, I was drawn to it. Maybe it was guilt. A fascination for the object pulling her away from me. My therapist is inclined to agree. But when Mother disappeared, I saw things differently. Nuances began to wake me in the night. Like the name carved in the frame; the wetness on the canvas, like she’d coated it with lacquer.”

Halford was losing patience, the pain throbbing like a tooth. “You said it wanted to be finished.”

Garvon nodded. “I left the next morning. Couldn’t stand to look at her. At what she’d become. When I built the nerve to come back, the house was empty. Of her, yes, but not the painting. It waited in the attic, like it always had… as if it always would be waiting. A nuclear bomb could level Los Angeles and the painting would survive. Her clothes were there on the floor, laid in a heap beneath the easel. That’s when I saw the changes. The sky was a deeper red. The ravens had changed positions. The paint was still wet.” His voice hushed to a stuttering whisper. “And when I touched it…”

Headlights shone through the window, arcing across the slate walls. Two honks cut the silence.  

The sound tore Halford from his trance. He looked around, saw the grooves his own fingernails had carved into the polish of the coffee table. His hands were trembling. “I have to go.”

Garvon gripped him as he rose. “You can’t. Not yet.”

But the man was small and Halford easily broke his grip.

At the door, Garvon lost it, keening like a child. “There was something in it! Behind the canvas. Moving. I hid it under the floor to stop myself from staring at it. Even then, I heard it whisper. In Mother’s voice. A dark power breathes beneath those colors. You feel it, too. I can see it. You’re being pulled!”

Halford kept his eyes down as he limped down the porch steps, knew if he looked back, he might stand there and never move again.

Boone was rolling down his window. “Why’re you limping like—?”

Halford jumped in. “Get the hell out of here! Go!”

“PLEASE,” Garvon screamed, pulling at his face. “FINISH IT! LIGHT IS A DOORWAY, MR. HALFORD!” And now the cheeks running with blood, the fingernails scraping curls of it like fine white wax. “THE LIGHT IS A DOORWAY!”

Boone stomped the gas, spitting white gravel across the drive. As they jumped the curb onto the street, Halford looked back.

Alex Garvon was on his knees. Howling at the sky.

16.

“You want to tell me what the fuck all that was about?” Boone was staring at him. They were parked in the alley beside Halford’s apartment.

Halford looked up at his apartment window. Saw the flicker of the TV. Knew the painting was in there. Waiting for him.

“You see the way he was pulling at his face?” Boone looked out the windshield and shook his head. “What the fuck?”

Halford opened the door. “I’m not coming in tomorrow.”

Boone turned with a drugged expression. He must have seen something in Halford’s eyes, because he turned back to whatever he was staring at in the alley and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Take the day off.” Halford was about to close the door when Boone said, “Where’re your tools?”

Halford smiled as he turned. Felt strangely comforted by the realization that he would never need them again. He opened the back door of the van, Boone’s glassy eyes watching from the rearview mirror.

“Where’re your tools?” Boone’s voice was quieter this time, more informed, as if only asking out of duty.

“Don’t worry about my tools.” Halford reached into Boone’s bucket and pulled out a ballpeen hammer. “I’m gonna borrow this. Okay?”

17.

Halford stood in the window of the yoga studio, watching the way the Adulterer’s head tilted up, the way his chiseled body danced with ropes of muscle. He stared until his body began to tremble. He felt a strange bifurcation taking place, felt himself pulling away in pieces. Halford knew he was standing here, but could also feel another part of him filling up the studio, slipping beneath the doors like smoke. The entire class was breathing him in. He would sink into their dreams. Wrap himself around their secrets. Like a snake. A pale python with burning eyes.

And she was there, too. Of course she was. Up in the front of the class. Ever the apt pupil. She looked better than she had when she was with him. Strangely, he did not spite her from this new, bisected state of existence. He saw the weakness in her. The ease with which corruption had laid hold. She was soiled. So were they all.

The Adulterer, at the front of the class, looked forward, eyes brushing over Halford’s face just three inches behind the fogged window.

He felt safe here. Even with the cars rushing down the street. When Halford closed his eyes he saw the python’s shovel-head flexed open. Saw the black tongue flicker beneath fans of crimson light. The light itself like liquid. An ocean alive with currents of forming tissue.

Light is a doorway, Mr. Halford.

And then his eyes were open and the class was breaking and he was fully himself again.

Halford walked to the bus bench on the sidewalk, a few yards from the doors. His back was to the entrance, but he could see everything from the bank windows across the street. He was sweating. And the sweat smelled of mud.

Birdy chatter fluttered behind him. The sound revolted him. It was intrusive. Fallacious. These women and their lives, their passions, dreams of union and security and eternal beauty. Halford wanted to turn around and scream that it was a lie; that the world was not round so much as it was pocked. And sometimes things hid in those pocks. Things waited.

He turned and caught sight of a buxom brunette. In the Renaissance, they would have worshipped her; but here on the sidewalk she walked alone, half-smiling at the private conversations, her eyes poised to catch a wandering glance, hoping to inject itself into the dialogue.

She looked at Halford and Halford looked away. Too quick, he knew. He could see her reflected in the bank windows, clutching her yoga matt.  Slowing down now to watch him. He angled his face away from her. Closed his eyes—

18.

And sees the crimson light, the python’s head, the swamp gnats clustered in tiny solar systems before his eyes. The smells of mud and rotten rootwork threaten to choke him, and somewhere deeper—a different smell. Like burning metal. Like electric transformers running in a dark, hot cave.

The light opens like a flower over the muddy clearing. Filaments swim together, long strips that behave like muscle. Halford opens his mouth in awe as they braid slowly into two vertical beams, side-by-side, perhaps a shoulder’s width apart.

The python’s eyes pulse even brighter, and the thought occurs to him that he is witnessing a miracle, or else a nightmare.  

Two lintels form from nothing, fixing horizontally to the top and bottom of the beams. Halford gapes up at it, feeling the cold drip into him. He is looking at a doorway constructed of what appears to be human flesh.

He picks himself out of the mud. Moves towards the hovering portal. It floats five feet above the mire. His feet know just where to go, climbing upward, finding solidity, though nothing is visible. With each step the voice becomes clearer, calling through the portal, calling for him to—

19.

Halford was alone again, on the bench. He glanced over his shoulder just in time to see Jane. She was holding the Adulterer around his waist, which, even through the thin cotton T-shirt, seemed stiff as marble. He had a clean face and strong jaw and a mustache that looked constructed of brown dandelion fluff. His hair was thick and sweaty. He was better looking than Halford. Taller. And obviously more interesting. They kissed then, just for him, Jane leaning into it with a hunger Halford had never seen. She looked like a lemming hurtling itself from a cliff. Self-destruction for the sheer joy of it.

Halford wanted to run away. He wanted to lock all her memories in a box and set the box on fire. He was nothing. She was everything. But once they had been halves. Before the slaughter. Before she’d cupped her hands before his stream and sucked the springwell dry. She was a parasite. Would do the same to this man. Would latch her filaments to the central organs and collapse them. Would keep him curious with aloofness just long enough to break his walls. Then the night would again be filled with the light of yet another burning kingdom; an entire line of them stretching behind her, as she trekked from man to man, a living plague.

Halford was weeping when he moved for his truck.

“Halford?”

He hunched his shoulders. Kept walking.

“Halford, is that you?”

Footsteps hastened after him, but he wouldn’t look, kept his neck tensed, the injury in his spine coming alive again. Each step brought the sensation of grinding pebbles, hot wires and glass. “Go away, Jane,” he whispered. “Just go—”

Strong hands spun him off balance and slammed him into the truck bed. The world went bright with pain. When the light resolved he was staring into the Adulterer’s eyes. They were angry and blazing and tinged with veins. No trace of the peace with which he’d taught his class.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Halford looked at Jane; she was biting her hand, bunching into her self.

The man pulled him forward then slammed him back, even harder. “Don’t look at her, asshole. Look at me. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.” Halford’s voice was calm. And there, in the pit of himself, he felt a detaching pressure. Like Velcro being pulled apart. “Jane, I just—”

The punch caught him off guard. Spun his eyes back toward Jane.

Light was everywhere, small fragments that hid within them a certain precision. An intelligence. They conjoined around Jane’s head, her shoulders, nearly invisible, like the slow buffeting of heat vapor.

The Adulterer was screaming in his face, but Halford could no longer hear. Static filled his mind, his ears, the world. The light glints were reddening, breathing across everything. Until it seemed as if the street itself was a veil atop some dark and wondrous place, a world filled with—

20.

Drums.

Their tempo is frantic as Halford steps forward, like the warmarch of an approaching pagan army. The wooden boards beneath him make a squelching noise against his weight. Like meat not yet thawed. He looks down, lifts a foot, and sees a faint impression of his bare heel there in the grain. The thoughts of Jane, of his body and what the Adulterer might be doing to it now, evaporate. He is too filled with wonder to be afraid. 

The open portal through which he’s traveled here waits behind him, a floating cavity just two feet beyond the porch’s steps. He can still see a faint outline of the swampy clearing, and the python slithering back into the trees.

Halford takes stock of his surroundings. He’s on a wide plantation porch with Doric columns. Picture windows of black glass flank a massive double-doorway affixed on crooked hinges. Red light crawls over everything, pulsing to the rhythm of the drums.  Beyond the porch is an ocean of mud and gray reeds; and further off—black cypresses clutch at the dusk.  

The front doors clap open behind him. “Haaaaalford,”  the voice like whispering pages.

The drums grow louder—Thump-tha-tha-thump, THUMP-tha-tha-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP—until he can no longer hear himself breathing.

He resists the impulse to turn. Keeps his eyes ahead. Nothing stirs the deadness of the swamp. And if he stands here for the next year, the reeds and distant trees will sit exactly as they do now, without a trespasser to disturb them. He knows this in his bones. Maybe once, long ago, this land had been alive. But the house has somehow drained it from the soil.

The drums stop, and in the distance he hears the caw of ravens.  “HALFORD DABUKE!” this time it doesn’t whisper; it screams in a panoply of octaves and volumes and sexes and accents—an entire population.  

Halford lunges for the portal—

And screams as the porch slides beneath him like a treadmill.

His terror is sudden and absolute. He brakes into a run, then walks, then leaps, shifting opposite directions just to trick it. And each time the porch knows before he does, acclimating, disguising its laughter under the crackle of shifting wood.

Halford drops on his knuckles to breathe, trembling now, trying not to think, to project the fate awaiting him. “I’m trapped here, aren’t I?” His voice falls flat on the windless air.  

Two heavy steps settle in the darkness beyond the threshold. You cannot leave, they seem to answer. There are things I must show you.

He doesn’t want to go inside. Will not go inside, he tells himself. 

But the ground begins to move then, and worse—his knuckles are fused to the wood. Halford lowers his head with a whimper. “Fine!” he screams. “FINE!”

Inside House Red all is darkness. But he can smell things. Mud. The dank perfume of roots and moisture. There’s no sign of the footsteps’ owner. No breathing, save the ragged whistle in his own throat. He is alone.

And yet the house is a presence in itself. Has life and weight and even, yes, a certain charisma. He feels it baking up from the floor.

A overhead spotlight flashes on to his right.

It frames a woman. She’s crouched over a painting in—no, no, it’s impossible, he things—what appears to be a replica of Alex Garvon’s attic. He can’t see what’s on the otherside of framed wood canvas. But knows what it is. What it has to be.

The woman holds a palm up as if to balance an invisible plate. Not until she dabs her finger into the center does Halford realize she has cupped it there to save the blood from spilling. A gray nest of hair drapes her shoulders. Her eyes shift back and forth across the canvas, as if waiting for instruction.

As Halford watches, the woman begins to paint the upper corner with her blood. She laughs as she does this. She sounds young. In perfect bliss. And when the palm runs dry, she takes it in her teeth and peels a bright pink flap open. The sound of the fibers tearing makes him nauseas. And yet he cannot look away.

She begins to spasm, flinging her arm forward, bright droplets catching the light before pattering the canvas. And then the joy on her face cramps into a rictus. Tears erupt and flood her cheeks. She’s shaking her head now. Trying to pull away. As if the body below her neck is being pushed against its will.

Her eyes go so wide that for one terrible moment Halford thinks the eyes themselves will explode. A great force sucks her forward, her hair and clothes flapping as from a gale of wind. Her hand slaps against the canvas and there is light, a bright red pulse of it that pronounces the bone structure of her face. The crackle of wood and cotton fiber thunders above her screams, accompanied by what sounds like roots milling through a gravel pit. She cries for help as she’s pulled in lurches. First her arm. Then her shoulder. She reaches behind her, but there’s nothing for her to grab, nothing to keep her balanced.

The spotlight goes out.

Halford waits in the darkness, the after-image of her cheek being pressed against the frame lasting in a hot blue image for several seconds. When he finally flushes the scene from his mind, his body’s trembling. He can hear his own teeth chattering.  

Then the ground begins to move.

Though now it’s at a slope.

And up ahead, growing louder, he hears sounds too terrible to—

21.     

Halford came back to his body with a gasp. Saw the scene before him with the torpidity of an underwater ballet; Jane floating forward in slow motion with her hands up; the Adulterer’s shoulder muscles flexing beneath his shirt in preparation for a second strike. Light glints danced over everything, streetlamps and neon signs and the passing headlights of cars, balanced in spiderwebs of brightness. He discerned their hidden language—the message first passed in Genesis, when the Great Housekeeper spoke light into the void. There was an instant of overwhelming clarity. It filled him with the secrets of the stars.

And then his arm came up, just as slowly as Jane was running towards him, and he marveled at the ballpeen hammer clutched within his grip. He smiled as the rounded metal slammed the Adulterer’s forehead; howled in glee as the divot of bone took on a strange angle and the gray eyes below it rolled up into their sockets. He turned as sensation came flooding to his free hand, saw that it had somehow already maneuvered the cab door open. And that the Adulterer was falling toward it in a perfect arch.

He caught Jane by the hair before she could strike him and brought the hammer down.

And when she, too, fell atop the Adulterer’s body, both of their legs hanging limply to the sidewalk, Halford turned in a slow, breathless circle.

The street was empty. The stores were dark. There were no cars. No cops. No anything. He smiled up at the glints of light surrounding him.

And was not surprised to see it smiling back.

22.

Halford waited in the darkness of the apartment. The TV was off. The microwave unplugged. A 200-watt work light framed pale, sweating faces. He’d duct-taped them to his dining chairs—a set of four that hadn’t been used since Jane’s departure. The painting was propped up on the third chair, and he got a thrill knowing it would be the first thing they saw, though the Adulterer’s return to consciousness seemed doubtful, at this stage.

The dent in his forehead had grown tumescent—like someone had implanted half a baseball beneath the skin. The swelling made him look inhuman. Every so often his leg jerked, and Halford was next to sure the man had soiled his pants.

Halford clapped his hands. And when Jane finally opened her eyes and started to whimper, he smiled to himself.

She looked ahead, just as he’d planned, focused on the painting, her brows perplexing, before she turned. The sight of the Adulterer made her whole body clench. She thrashed against her binding, jerking the chair legs—or trying to; Halford had nailed them to the floor.

“Shut up now.” He said it gently, as if she were a child.

Her eyes snapped forward. Blue pinpricks in the light. Waiting.

“Welcome back.”  Halford rose, coming right up to the light, knowing she still couldn’t see him. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. And you were right, Jane. You were right all along. Now you’ve heard me say it. Enjoy it. You deserve that.”

She shook her head fervently, red hair spilling onto her forehead, where a sheet of blood had gone stale and brown. Her cheeks puffed up against the duct tape in a series of moans.

“Don’t deny it now. I didn’t have hobbies, or loves, or dreams. There wasn’t anything to believe in. Until this.”

He set a hand on the frame, felt something shiver through the fibers, and quickly let go. He walked in front of the light and squinted down at the painting. Felt the reverence reserved for holy relics rise in him like a tide.

Between the frame was a mansion with Doric columns, sunken and crooked with age. And all of it red. Marbled with blacks and maroons and the claret of deep wounds. The mansion’s foundation appeared to be collapsing, as if something was growing beneath the house and simultaneously destroying it. The sweeping porch steps descended into mud. And up in the topmost steeple, the window was flung wide to reveal a square of darkness. That detail was more unsettling than the bone-finger cypresses lining the purple horizon, or the strange birds that seemed to fly upside down and sideways and, in some places, collide with one another, transforming into shapes monstrous beyond description. He sensed a watchfulness from that window. An urgency.

“Can’t you see?” He turned to her, knowing he must look insane. “It’s more terrible than anything. But that makes it special. More beautiful.”

He hesitated, recalling the old woman from his vision or dream or whatever it was, the violent suction of her mergence with the paint. He saw her hand, over and over. The moment it touched the canvas.

Garvon had said the painting wanted to be finished. But maybe that was wrong. He stared at the unfinished patch of canvas in the top right corner. Cracked and yellow. Like skin.

“Maybe it wanted them to only think they could master it.” He heard Jane whimpering and spun on her. “BE QUIET!”

She shook again, then fell still.

“Think of it in a different way. It’s like a war being fought by a starving battalion,” Halford began to pace, unaware that he resembled Garvon in those moments before he cracked. “They’re out of food. With barely enough ammo to defend themselves. And so they set a trap. They expose their weakness. And when the enemy rushes, they bottleneck themselves in a place where their superior numbers mean nothing.”

He paused, seeing it clearly, understanding the look in the woman’s eyes, understanding that she’d been prompted, as he’d been prompted, as, perhaps, had thousands before them both.

The painting was alive in some grotesque function of the word; possessed animus, even predation. And like the assassin bug, which plucks the silk webbing of the spider to affect a struggling prey, the painting was intelligent enough to make him feel in control. Right up until the last moment.   

Halford knelt before it. Seemed to hear the ravens cawing as they wheeled above House Red. The frame itself looked older. The light brought out striations and patterns reminiscent of petrified wood. He had a sudden vision of it propped up in some ancient cave, surrounded by Neolithic men in their stinking furs, the chieftan approaching to press a child against the paint; the awful suction of consumption drowned, as all fell to their knees, grunting prayers.

He stood up, backing away. Bit his nails as he looked from Jane to the painting to Jane again.

Tears filled her eyes. She moaned quietly, shaking her head.

“But it’s possible,” he dropped down to cup her face. “I have to try. I don’t know why, but I do. There’s two of me now. I know that must sound crazy, that you must think I’m crazy … but I’m not.” He smiled. “They all say that, don’t they? People who’ve gone crazy.”

When he saw the abject terror in her eyes he dropped his chin and sighed. “You can’t possibly understand. Not yet.”

Then he grabbed the Adulterer’s scalp and dragged him forward.

23.

She screamed and screamed and screamed.

24.

Halford stood back and stared at his masterpiece. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, the bared forearms slick with blood. The chair had split into pieces; they sat in a heap, piled with the Adulterer’s bloody clothes and clots of duct tape. The painting didn’t like superfluous material of any kind. It ate flesh. He was sure of that now. It wasn’t just a doorway; it was a mouth.

Jane’s sobs danced on the air. There was poetry in their cadence. A rhythm that seemed to compliment the menace of their task; for he was sure now, more than ever, she was just as much a part of this as he was. 

“Do you see it?” he pulled off her duct tape and pointed. “The corner. It’s filling in.”

She looked up with him in awed silence, her voice filled with tears. “What have you done?”

The painted purple sky shimmered with red light and began to move, the ravens circling and slamming into one another, becoming larger, merging into things no living man should ever see. Halford shivered. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. The blank patch of canvas in the upper corner filled itself, the firmament darknening in a time-lapse of deepest midnight. It was like watching another world. Stars pronounced themselves across the sky, and a sickle moon rode eastward over the cypress trees.

And when dawn rose over House Red, the mud at the foot of the steps began to bubble, giving birth to a shape that struggled to its feet. It pulled itself up the steps. Stood on quaky legs. Not until it turned did Halford understand what he was looking at.

The Adulterer unhinged his mouth in a silent scream. Clinging to the Doric columns. Reaching out in their direction. Halford actually laughed. He bent forward and waved.

The Adulterer cast his arms out, begging them.

But the double doors were already opening.

Jane jerked in her chair. “No, Halford. Please…”

Black roots leapt from the doorway, wrapping his wrists, his torso, his neck. One cinched around his mouth like a gag. He was pulled back with such force he seemed to blip out of existence. The doors slammed closed, and the massive raven thing perched on the steeple like some grotesque dragon before shattering into its smaller parts, which took their accustomed places in the sky. It was all done in thirty seconds.

The painting trembled; shimmered; fell still.

“It’s time.” Halford approached it slowly. Reached out with trembling fingers.

“Don’t,” Jane begged him. “Please. I can’t watch that twice. Please, Halford.”   

“You still don’t understand, do you?” He looked back and smiled.  “It’s okay now. It’s ours.”

25.

The police received a call from Boone Tallard two days later.

What they found in Halford’s apartment was quoted on page seventeen of the Los Angeles times as “disturbing evidence of violence.” A ballpeen hammer with blood and human hair crusted along its head. Three piles of clothes clustered around what appeared to be some kind of torture chair, and various strips of duct tape. Of Halford Dabuke, there was no remnant. They found more blood in his empty truck. And it wasn’t until the Missing Person’s report of Jane Malloy was filed that the police made their connection. Bank Security cameras from across the street revealed the footage of the abduction. But there, the trail runs cold.

They did not find a painting at the residence.

It hangs now in the trailer of Boone Talard, who at first tried to throw the thing away, but in the end decided to keep it, for some reason that even now he can’t recall. He no longer re-pipes houses, but relies instead on his social security check to survive. Every morning the neighbors in his Trailer Court watch him leave the aluminum stoop wrapped in a robe; watch him look over his shoulder before shuffling off to the liquor store to procure his daily feast. What they cannot watch is the silent hours in which he sits before the painting hung upon his wall, staring at the muddy steps and crooked architecture; staring at the strange ravens that sometimes seem more dragon than bird; but staring mostly at the window in the highest steeple.

It is no longer flung open.

It is closed.

And sometimes Boone can see a light burning behind the blackened panes, and in it, the movement of two bodies, raising their clutched hands together, as royalty in address to their silent kingdom.

[Note from the author: It's been too long. Be mad at me. Hurl expressions pregnant with tacit invective at the screen. Curse me. I deserve that. I've been too busy reenacting scenes from Californication and chasing happiness in those warm places that also sometimes birth children. I am a fool who has left the faucet running at home, while he wanders the cold streets in a trance. The faucet, of course, is creativity. And the mental house has been flooded in my absence. There are now so many ideas, so many directions, that my fingers have refused to bend the knee. And so this is the first story I've written since my break-up. It took me longer than it should have; required many nights of being mocked by a blinking cursor and trying hard not to fall asleep at my desk. Bradbury claims there is no such thing as writer's block; there are only stories that no longer interest the mind chosen to expose them. But this was different. This was worth the wait. Or maybe it wasn't. You can decide. ***typos brought to you by the man who will fix them once you mention it***]