Haunted Worlds Read online

  “A white deer,” he said.

  Feeding Oblivion

  A craggy-featured man with a nicotine-yellowed beard stood on a wedge of traffic island close to where Kent had stopped at a red light, on his way to visit his mother. The man wore a filthy gray hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head, shadowing his eyes. In his hands he held a cardboard sign that read: HOMELESS VET. NEED HELP. HUNGRY. GOD BLESS.

  Kent avoided looking at the panhandler directly, but he still sensed the man’s eyes in the shadow of his hood, certain they were locked direct­ly on him through the driver’s side window. Kent groaned in­wardly and was just about to lower the window and offer the change he kept for tolls, when the light turned green. With relief, he continued onward.

  *

  The lobby always smelled to Kent of boiled chicken, no doubt from the kitchen somewhere close by. He signed the log at the reception counter, then turned toward the elevator, where a pleasant Nigerian woman he had spoken with in the past was offloading the elevator’s passengers: two elderly women and one man in wheelchairs. Beaming up at Kent as she was wheeled past him, one of the women asked hopefully, “Are you my nephew?”

  He wanted to apologize that he was not, but the Nigerian attendant was already pushing the woman’s wheelchair away. Kent saw her look back over her shoulder at him, longingly he thought, before he continued on into the elevator.

  Because his mother had been living with his younger brother, when it had come time to put her into a “rehabilitation center” due to poor health (as if one could be rehabilitated from old age), the nursing home chosen was close to his brother’s apartment. It made sense, of course, and Kent’s brother—gay and unmarried—visited her almost every day. But for Kent it was nearly an hour’s drive. Well, he’d had to drive that far to see her anyway, when she’d been living in his brother’s apartment. So it wasn’t the distance that depressed him whenever he set out to visit her, but the sad fact that he would step into her room to find her lying there in that narrow hospital bed. Where once she’d had a whole house to herself, and multiple cats—and later, when they’d had to sell the house and give away the cats, at least a room of her own in his brother’s place—now his mother’s living space was reduced to half a room, shared with another woman. And here his mother had always been such a shy and private person.

  Sometimes Kent planned ahead with his mother on the phone, to let her know he was coming, but other times he liked to drop in unexpectedly to surprise her, to make his visits a little more special. Anything to give her some respite from monotony (though to the rehabilitation center’s credit, they did take the patients out on various excursions, organized bingo and trivia games for them, and brought in live musicians). Whenever he came, Kent would always speak politely with her roommate, but only briefly, since his time would be limited. The roommate she had started out with, Carol, had recovered sufficiently from whatever ailment she had suffered and her doctors had allowed her to return home. Kent hoped that wouldn’t give his mother false hope, because her condition was different. They couldn’t risk another episode like her most recent fall, when she’d lain on the bathroom floor until Kent’s brother had come home from work to find her there, waiting for him, too weak to rise.

  She was on her second roommate now: Ruth, a woman of ninety—five years older than his mother—and Kent had only met her once before. Much more quiet than the garrulous Carol, when Kent now entered the room she only looked up at him smiling from her chair, where she’d been sitting watching TV. Sure enough, his mother was lying back in her bed to watch her own little TV, too weak to sit up comfortably in a chair for long. This time he had let her know he was coming, and she smiled up at him warmly, toothlessly, as he stepped nearer to the bed and leaned down to give her a kiss.

  After his mother had asked him how the traffic had been, how his wife was, how his daughter was doing in college, Kent finally turned to wave across the room to Ruth, who had continued watching him and smiling all this time. “Hello, Ruth,” he said loudly, knowing she was a bit hard of hearing.

  The snowy-haired woman nodded at him and wiggled the fingers of one hand in turn. She said, “Your mother is a wonderful woman.”

  “Yes, she is, thank you.”

  “She’s lucky she has two loving sons. I never had any children. I couldn’t.”

  “Oh . . . I’m sorry to hear that,” Kent said sincerely. His mother had already confided that to him over the phone. She said no one had come to visit Ruth except, one time, a niece. Both Ruth and his mother had lost their husbands over a decade ago.

  He had brought his mother a decaf coffee and several doughnuts, and after elevating her bed so she could enjoy this treat, he offered one of the doughnuts to Ruth. She tried to decline, but he persisted until she finally accepted. As Kent stepped to her side of the room to hand her the doughnut, he noticed her TV was playing a nature program with the sound muted. On the screen, time-lapse photography showed the body of a dead mouse being reduced to a skeleton by a seething mass of maggots.

  “You’re so kind,” Ruth told him as she accepted the doughnut. “You and your brother and your mother. It’s because of you people that those things haven’t gotten me yet.”

  “What things, Ruth?” Kent asked.

  “Those big centipedes that come out of there.” She pointed behind him.

  Kent turned and saw only a drab, institutional white wall with a cork bulletin board, bearing a single birthday or get-well card, presumably from her niece. He looked back to her. “You’ve seen centipedes in here?” They appeared in his own house sometimes, the fast kind with long hairy legs. Once, all lathered up in the shower, he’d realized there was one on the tiled wall only inches away from him, and he’d nearly slipped and broken his neck jumping out of the shower to find something to kill it with.

  “Yes,” the old woman replied, looking sad, as if with fatalism. “Big black centipedes. At least, I guess that’s what they are. They’re afraid of other people, though. If I was alone they’d come for me, but because your dear mother is always with me they only sneak out a little to have a look. Then they duck back inside again.”

  “Inside . . . the wall?” He glanced over at his mother. Though she was physically very weak, his mother’s mind was still sharp, and he could see the pity in her eyes that told him Ruth was only delusional. The “centipedes” were not real.

  “Yes,” Ruth answered again. “They pull back into the wall. I don’t know what’s on the other side, but it must not be good. It must be full of those things. Can you imagine? A place that’s nothing but centipedes? Millions and billions of them, pushing all against you? Pushing against your eyes, getting in your mouth . . . in your lungs? Who’d ever want to go there? Not me.”

  “Huh,” Kent said, at a loss. “Yeah, well . . . I’ll talk to the nurses’ station about the problem, Ruth, okay? Maybe somebody can . . . spray or something.”

  “Oh, I’ve already told them,” she sighed, sitting back in her chair and breaking off a piece of doughnut. “Again and again.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, wanting this conversation to be over, “but I’m sure it’ll be all right. Like you said, my mother’s always here to protect you, right?”

  “Mm-hm,” Ruth mumbled around the doughnut she chewed, but her eyes remained sad behind the lenses of her glasses.

  *

  It was three weeks before Kent returned to see his mother. He made excuses to himself that work was tiring, and he needed to spend time with his wife, tend to matters around the house, but he knew he was simply avoiding it. At least he’d been calling her once a week. The last time they’d spoken on the phone, a few days ago, he’d asked his mother, “So how’s poor Ruth doing?”

  “Oh,” said his mother, and he knew that miserable tone of hers, knew that what she was going to relate wasn’t good. “It isn’t easy.”

  “Is she awake?”

  “Yes,” his mother said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “but she can’t hear
me. Her hearing isn’t good, and so she plays her TV so loud .”

  “Yeah, I can hear it now.” Though he remembered it had been muted during his last visit.

  “But it’s worse than that. At night she has these nightmares . . . night terrors, I guess.”

  “Yeah? What does she do, freak out?”

  “Yes . . . and then the nurses come in. I’m so tired. I haven’t been able to get a decent night’s sleep in days.”

  “Oh, wow, Mom. Well, that’s not fair to you. Did you tell Greg about this?” Greg was his younger brother.

  “Yes. He’s going to see if they can find another room for me. Or her. I hate to be like that, but—”

  “Hey, no, don’t feel badly—you have to think of yourself. How is it good for you to have to put up with that? If they don’t listen to Greg I’ll give them my two cents’ on it too. We’ll take care of it for you, Mom.”

  “All right,” she sighed, still sounding guilty for having complained about the other woman.

  “Anyway, I’m going to come see you on Saturday.”

  “You don’t have to, Kent. I know you’re busy.”

  “Quiet,” he admonished her, “I’m coming, okay?” He did have to, after all. How much longer could he realistically expect his mother to remain on this earth? He felt terrible enough already for neglecting her as much as he did. This was the mother whom he had loved so much as a boy that on his first day of school in the first and even the second grade he had wept in despair when she’d dropped him off and returned home, as if she might be abandoning him at an orphanage. This was the mother whose auburn hair he would twirl around his fingers while he sat on her lap as they watched movies together on their black-and-white TV. She was still that same person, still here, not just a collection of memories like photographs bundled with rubber bands—as his father had become—stored in the attic of his mind.

  How would he feel when he was elderly, in some nursing home, and his daughter was too busy to come visit him? He was already in his early fifties . . . it was not so far-flung a consideration. Already he felt sad and a little resentful that his daughter came home so infrequently to see her parents. How could he expect her to act any differently when he set so poor an example?

  He was determined to grab his daughter next time she was in town and drag her out to visit her poor grandmother. But in the meantime, he was determined to drag himself to see her this Saturday. No more excuses.

  As bad as it was for his mother, though, at least she had two sons, one of whom saw her diligently, and a grandchild. How much worse was it for Ruth, facing her last days alone?

  With his mother’s roommate having once more risen to his thoughts, Kent asked his mother, “So what does Ruth do when she has these night terrors?”

  “Oh,” his mother moaned in that tone again, “she starts crying and screaming about the centipedes coming out of the wall. It’s always the centipedes. She begs me to wake up and look at them, so they’ll be afraid and go away.”

  “Oh, wow. Poor thing. So you don’t think you really have centipedes in there, huh?”

  “No,” his mother sighed. “It can’t be. They’re big black centipedes, she says—a foot long.”

  *

  His wife, Veronica, had made excuses of her own for not coming with him to visit his mother today. They’d had a fight about it, and a half hour into his ride Kent was still steaming. He strongly suspected Ronnie looked forward to his trips to see his mother, for then she was free to visit whoever it was he was certain she was seeing. Most likely that friend of hers from work, chubby boyish Matt, whom he had caught her texting on her cell phone several times like an overgrown teenager—ostensibly about work matters. During some of their fights, over the past few years, one or the other of them had even evoked the fearsome D-word.

  Beneath his steaming anger, what Kent really felt was a despair so great it left him scooped hollow inside. All those yearly trips to Acadia National Park in Maine, first just the two of them and then later with their daughter—until she became a teenager and the company of friends became more desirable than the company of parents. He recalled the joy he and Ronnie had experienced on the day their daughter was born—the joy of bringing her home from the hospital. Remembering these things and more, Kent felt something akin to the sadness of remembering himself sitting on his mother’s lap, watching TV and playing with her auburn hair, which glittered with coppery highlights in the mellow light of afternoon. It was as though he stood on the edge of a deep well—a well that was the void inside himself—into which all the things he loved were fluttering away like photographs released from the flimsy rubber bands that had bound them.

  Churning with these thoughts, he slowed his car to a stop at a red light, and out of the corner of his eye he recognized that same shabby castaway on the traffic island, holding a new sign that read: NO HOME. PLEASE HELP. NEED TO EAT. GOD BLESS. Kent fought the urge to look at the homeless man more directly, but the imp of the perverse compelled him to steal one quick peek. In that instant, he thought he saw a long dark shape go slithering across the man’s face, up into the shadow cast by his hood—as if a sinuous ribbon of blackness had fled out of sight into one of the man’s shadowed eye sockets.

  The light changed to green, and Kent depressed the gas pedal perhaps a little more than necessary. Just his agitated state of mind, he told himself. The blackness in his own brain.

  *

  When he entered his mother’s room, Kent’s eyes were first drawn to Ruth, as if she were the one he had come to see. He saw her lying back in her bed asleep, with her TV still running loudly. He bent over his mother to kiss her and asked, “You want me to turn her sound down?”

  “No,” his mother said in a hush, “I’m afraid it might wake her up. She told me today the centipedes are afraid of the sound . . . they think it’s people talking to her. Poor woman.”

  “Yes,” said Kent. He was glad the blaring TV covered their conversation, but he didn’t know how his mother could enjoy her own TV this way, let alone sleep. “Greg and I exchanged a few emails this week. He said he pushed the center about getting you a new room. They told him they’d consider moving Ruth to a room of her own instead, if she’s being disruptive. It’s a shame that she’ll have to go without company, but if she just gets moved in with a different person then that’s not fair to them either. It seems like the only resolution.”

  “I know,” his mother sighed, “but . . . I feel sorry for her. I don’t want her to be lonely. She doesn’t have anyone.”

  “Like I told you, Mom, you have to worry about yourself. We can’t worry about everyone else, can we?” No, he thought. Worrying about everyone else wasn’t the way of people. It was enough of a stretch, too often, to get them to worry about those closest to them.

  He sat on a chair by the side of his mother’s hospital bed, chatting with her as they watched a rerun of an old western program, The Big Valley, that they had both liked decades ago—long before he’d had a wife or a daughter. But finally he looked over at his mother and saw she had fallen asleep, her once lively auburn hair now like a gray and decaying halo around her pillowed head. He was tempted to wake her up to let her know he was leaving, but didn’t want to disturb her after she’d complained lately of not getting a good night’s rest, so he wrote a note for her instead and placed it on her rolling bedside table. In the note he promised he’d call her tomorrow.

  As he rose to turn and leave the room, he realized that Ruth had sat up in her own bed at some point, eyes staring wide. It wasn’t him she was staring at, however, but the wall opposite her bed, with its nearly empty cork bulletin board.

  “They started to come out,” the old woman said, without taking her gaze from the wall, “but they saw you here and crawled back inside. They thought it was safe, with your mother asleep, but you scared them.”

  “You should go back to sleep, Ruth,” Kent told her, taking a few steps closer to her bed to be sure she could hear him. “You just need to ge
t some more rest.”

  She cranked her head around to look up at him mournfully. “That’s what they’re waiting for. They want me to let my guard down.”

  “Now, now, Ruth,” he told her, “you’ll be fine, don’t worry. The staff won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “It will happen to them, too, someday,” she told him. “Those crawly things come for us all when we’re alone and forgotten. Once we get close enough to that black place behind the wall, they get hungry.” She dropped her voice to a more confidential tone and warned, “When you start to see them, you’ll know you’re too close to the wall.”

  *

  Monday evening, after they had both got home from their respective jobs, Kent and his younger brother spoke on the phone. Kent had arrived to find his house empty, with no note from his wife to explain where she might be. Maybe shopping, or maybe in bed with her scandalously younger—at forty-five—coworker Matt. Did it really matter anymore?

  Greg had been the one to call Kent, and he reported, “They moved Ruth into a private room today. Mom said she had a really rough night last night, the worst yet. Ruth was really flipping out.”

  “About those centipede things that live in the wall?”

  “Yup. Very delusional. Mom feels badly about it, but—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Kent replied. “I told her she needs to think of numero uno.”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “They going to get Mom another roommate?”

  “Probably. The center doesn’t make money off empty beds.”

  “You got that right. Old age is big business.” As was the funeral business. Before they had placed their mother into the nursing home, the brothers had met with a funeral director to make advance arrangements for their mother, in an effort to allocate her money before the state sucked up what little she had.

  Greg said, “I just hope the next roommate isn’t so difficult. I really wish Mom could have a room to herself. She’s never been the buddy-buddy type.”