Darker Worlds Page 4

  Her washers wound down one by one, and she used a wheeled cart to transfer the loads to the dryers running along the right side of the small, narrow room. Three had Out of Order signs so she went to the very end, near the restroom, where the man had been sitting. She fed in enough quarters for an hour on each of the four machines, then again returned to her book and the lukewarm remaining third of her coffee.

  She glanced up as the door opened again, another frigid phantom lunging inside in search of its departed brother. Into the laundromat shambled a smallish man buried inside a coat and maybe multiple sweaters, a greasy baseball cap pulled low on his head. A white beard sprouted from deep fissures, though she placed him only in his fifties. He met her eyes for a second but quickly broke the connection like a timid dog, and went to sit down in a chair opposite her, near the front folding tables. As he passed he left an invisible trail that made her hold her breath until it had dissipated a bit. In his lap he opened a plastic bag from the convenience store in the strip mall and drew out a single breakfast bar and a small bottle of orange juice, unwrapping the former and uncapping the latter meticulously, as if performing a Japanese tea ritual.

  He noticed her examining him, looked up sheepishly and said in a slowed-down and uninflected kind of voice, “I’m sorry to bother you. It’s cold outside tonight.”

  “I understand,” said Mrs. Pearson. “It’s all right; you aren’t bothering me.”

  He lowered his eyes again, munching his pulped cardboard breakfast bar self-consciously.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  “Donny.”

  “Hi, Donny. I’m Carol,” she lied. “Carol Weir. Donny, it really isn’t my business – and again, it’s not that you’re bothering me, because you aren’t – but don’t you have another warm place to go to? Don’t you have a home?”

  “Ohh,” he said hesitantly, or evasively, “I have a place to go to later.”

  “A shelter?”

  “Welll, I have stayed in shelters. Not for a while, though.”

  “So where do you stay now – with a friend? Family?”

  “Welll, kind of. I found my way into a special place.”

  “Really? A special place?”

  “Yeah. I was happy to find my mom there. But I still stay out here most times, ‘cause Mom says I’m not ready yet to stay in the special place forever.”

  His mother would have to be elderly. Was the “special place” he’d found her in a nursing home? Assisted living housing?

  Mrs. Pearson glanced up at the CCTV camera mounted over the front door. Speculating, weighing. Thinking of her blue husband, back home. She knew she was the stronger of the two. In the end, it was the lioness that did the hunting.

  “How’d you find this special place, Donny?” Listening to her own voice, she thought she’d make as convincing a gentle and nurturing elementary school teacher as she was a friendly and earnest car dealer.

  “Welll,” the shabby man said. He appeared reluctant, still avoiding eye contact.

  “Go on, hon.”

  “When I started getting dreams about the special place, and my mom waving to me, I got a teeny hole up here.” He tapped the front of his baseball cap. “Every night I dreamed more, and I kept getting closer to my mom, and the hole got deeper and deeper. And then…welll…”

  “Yes?”

  “Then I learned I could go inside-out, and I was in the special place for real. It wasn’t just a dream anymore. And my mom was happy to see me, too – ‘cause she hadn’t seen me since she died.”

  “Hold on…your mom is dead, Donny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” She digested this, then backtracked a bit. “So you said you do what? Go inside-out?”

  “Yeah. ‘Cause the hole got deep enough. See?” Turning toward her more directly, he reached up and pulled away his filthy baseball cap.

  Mrs. Pearson suppressed an exclamation. There was indeed a hole in the center of the man’s forehead. It might as well be a bullet hole, for its size and its black depth, but neat and bloodless with a slightly raised rim. Of course, it couldn’t be a bullet hole, but some other kind of injury? Or was it self-inflicted? He had said the hole had become gradually deeper. Had he picked it open himself over time?

  It was easy to believe he wasn’t currently making use of any homeless shelter; she couldn’t imagine that no one would have tended to him if they’d seen this wound. No, he was living on the streets, maybe autistic but definitely delusional.

  Again, she considered the camera. Thought of the police. But a missing homeless man was not a missing kindergartener. For all intents and purposes he was already missing.

  Across the room, one of the dryers she had loaded began hissing dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk. She saw Donny look that way. She asked him, “Does that sound like a voice to you?”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “What does it sound like it’s saying?”

  “Welll…” he lifted his bushy chin a little, blue eyes gazing into space “…sounds like it’s saying ‘dirty desk.’”

  “Huh,” said Mrs. Pearson. Was it a sign, after all? She resumed their previous discussion. “So Donny, the hole…it helps you turn inside-out? And you go to the special place, to visit your dead mom? Then what?”

  “Then when I need to come back here, I fold right-side-out again.”

  “Like…like if I turn a shirt inside-out? Then back again?”

  “Yeah. Like that I guess.”

  “Oh wow. Cool. You’re a talented guy.”

  Donny shrugged, and drank some orange juice.

  “Well, tonight when you go there, tell your mom that your new friend Carol says hello, okay?”

  “Okay, Carol.” He screwed the orange juice’s cap back on and began rising from his seat.

  “Oh, Donny, are you leaving? Can you wait until my clothes are finished drying, so I won’t be here alone? It’s kind of scary here alone at night, ya know?”

  “Okay, Carol,” he said, sinking into his plastic chair again.

  ***

  Mrs. Pearson waited until Donny had shuffled down the street – away from the strip mall with its laundromat and convenience store cameras – and into a black space between streetlights before pulling up beside him in her glistening new car. She rolled down her window, letting in an arctic flood. “Donny, hold up! I saw you didn’t have much to eat back there. Let me take you to my house for some dinner – anything you want. Hamburgers…steak…”

  “Well,” he said, shifting uneasily, “my mom told me to be careful about strangers.”

  “Donny, I’m not a stranger, I’m your friend Carol, remember?”

  “I have to go see Mom in the special place tonight.”

  “Just for a while, then. Afterwards I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go. Come on, I’ll introduce you to my husband. You’ll like him…he’s very nice.”

  “I guess so,” Donny mumbled. “I like hamburgers.”

  He and his atmosphere of body odor filled the seat beside her. “I do, too!” she chirped, pulling away from the curb.

  ***

  “What is this?” Mr. Pearson said when he held open the front door and his wife was followed into their home at 159 Golden Elm Lane by a bearded homeless man carrying one of their baskets of laundry.

  She stepped close to him and in a low voice said, “This is it.”

  “It is?” He felt disoriented and nervous and excited all at once, like just before the first time he had ever had sex.

  “Get ready to make hamburgers,” she said. Following Donny back outside to get the last two baskets, she looked over her shoulder and added, “And put some tarps down in the basement.”

  ***

  “There, now don’t you feel better, hon?” Mrs. Pearson asked Donny when he emerged from the bathroom freshly showered and wearing her husband’s plaid flannel bathrobe.

  “Thanks, Carol,” he said, a shy smile hiding in his damp beard.

&
nbsp; The hamburgers were waiting on the dining room table, and the three of them took seats. When Mr. Pearson reached out to assemble a burger for himself, his wife said, “Careful – don’t fill up.”

  He looked up at her. Stared. “Really?” he said.

  She smiled at him, her eyes large and incandescent. “Why not?”

  Donny ate three hamburgers, as if to make up for his hosts, and chips from a bowl besides. While he ate, Mrs. Pearson told him, “After you’re done, Donny, before we drive you to where you want to go we’ll get you dressed in some of Mr. Weir’s old clothes. They’re in better shape than what you came here in, and I’m sure we even have a nice winter coat for you, too. Okay?”

  “Really? Sure...okay. Thanks, Carol.”

  When Donny just couldn’t eat another bite, Mr. Pearson said to his wife, “Well, the calf is fatted. Let me go downstairs to see about...you know, those clothes.” He rose from the table.

  “Elton John,” said Donny.

  “What?” Mrs. Pearson turned toward him.

  Without meeting her eyes, as if bashful about his interjection, Donny explained, “Elton John talked about that in a song. Killing the fatted calf. It was Bennie and the Jets.”

  Mrs. Pearson tilted up her chin, blinked at the wall, ran the song in her head until she got to the words. “So he did,” she said.

  “My favorite Elton John song is The Bitch is Back,” Mr. Pearson said, as he crossed the room toward the door to the basement. “It reminds me of Mrs. Weir.”

  “Ohh,” said Donny, frowning. “That isn’t nice.”

  “Just go down and look for those clothes, dumbass,” Mrs. Pearson retorted. To Donny she said, “Thank you, Donny. At least one man here is a gentleman.”

  “My mom taught me to be a gentleman,” he explained gravely.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Mr. Pearson chuckled, as he closed the basement door behind him.

  ***

  Mrs. Pearson had taken a minute to change into an old pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, clothes she wouldn’t miss, and she preceded Donny downstairs barefoot. She found several large, overlapping plastic tarps spread out across the cellar floor. They reminded her of the time their basement had flooded, but the water hadn’t been bright blue like this. On a tripod was her husband’s digital camera, a glowing light indicating it was already running in video mode. “Mr. Weir isn’t such a dumbass after all,” she mumbled.

  She saw Donny gazing toward a black doorway. Nervously? She explained, “That’s where the water heater and the washer and dryer are.” The soon-to-be-replaced washer and dryer. When the new units were delivered and installed, the men would never suspect what had transpired down here tonight, and that gave Mrs. Pearson a delicious internal shiver. Had she ever felt as alive as she did at this moment?

  She reached to the homeless man and took hold of both his hands, turning him to face her as if leading him in the first steps of a dance. “Donny, why don’t you take off that robe now so we can get you changed into your new clothes?”

  “Oh, no, I can’t do that here,” he said, trying to slip his hands out of hers, but she squeezed them a little tighter.

  “Why, hon?”

  “I, I got nothing on under.”

  “It’s okay, don’t be shy.”

  “No…no, no, no,” he said, shaking his head.

  “It’s okay,” said Mr. Pearson, emerging from the black void of the laundry room directly behind Donny, “I’m not worried about the robe.” Donny began twisting around toward his voice, but Mr. Pearson clamped his left palm across the smaller man’s forehead and pulled his head back against his shoulder. With his right hand, he reached around and drew the razor edge of a kitchen knife across Donny’s throat.

  Donny started to buck, but the larger and stronger Mr. Pearson had that firm hold on his head and Mrs. Pearson gripped his hands with all her strength, gritting her teeth in something like a bared snarl or grin. She admired her husband greatly just then, how he hadn’t even hesitated. She hadn’t known until now if he really had it in him.

  The Pearsons had watched many a beheading video while making love. Mr. Pearson had commented once how usually in the videos made by ISIS and their ilk the man doing the cutting got right down to sawing immediately, but in the Mexican narco videos the cutter often first slit the throat to let the victim bleed out some. This was the technique Mrs. Pearson saw her husband was going for, his blade now hovering to one side. Sheets of hot blood splashed down between Donny and herself, onto her bare feet as if a bucket was being poured out onto them.

  The only sound he had made thus far was a quickly broken off grunt. Reflexively, Donny’s hands squeezed hers back hard. His eyes were locked on her own, blue as the tarp his blood cascaded onto, bulging and unblinking, with a clarity that she had as yet not seen. Wide with enormous emotion. Fear? Hatred? Staring into them, as if to suck out his life energy through them, Mrs. Pearson said in her earnest car dealer’s voice, selling him on his own death, “Don’t worry, Donny. It’s time to go be with your mom for good now.”

  In movies when the hero slashed the throat of an enemy sentry the victim dropped instantly dead, but she knew from videos it didn’t work that way. She expected Donny to remain conscious until her husband, finally sawing into the front of his gaping neck, got to the bone. She expected any second to hear Donny begin making those typical wet snuffling-gasping sounds as he tried to draw air through the wound but only sucked lungfuls of blood.

  What she didn’t expect, though, was to see her husband snatch his hand away from Donny’s forehead, startled, and to then see that the bullet-like hole in the center of the forehead had grown larger, like a mouth widened in a scream.

  ***

  Mr. Pearson had stepped back so abruptly – no longer making any contact with their guest – that he had accidentally knocked over the tripod, the digital camera striking the floor.

  He couldn’t see what was happening at the front of the homeless man’s head, but he saw what was going on at the back. How would he describe it, though? It was all happening so quickly, and everything was moving…fluid. Was the man’s head like a rose, blooming with convoluted layers of pink petals, only to quickly wither and fold into itself again, as if in time-lapse photography? Or might it be compared to a strangely misshapen balloon that was having the air squeezed out of it? A hollow globe of paper crumpled up between two hands? A sweater pulled off one’s head and pushed back through its own neck hole, only to disappear as it went?

  Because the man appeared, in fact, to be disappearing into his own face…pouring into himself instead of onto the floor, not just his blood now but his whole essence, liquefied flesh and bone. In a mere blink he was headless, the sucking drain of a hole now situated in the stump of his neck. He dropped to his knees on the tarp, and he dragged Mrs. Pearson down with him so violently that she fell onto her side, her hands still crushed in his grip.

  Mr. Pearson looked down at her, their eyes locked as hers had been with the homeless man’s only seconds before. This time it was hers that bulged with enormous emotion. She cried her husband’s name. He didn’t lunge forward to hack at the man’s hands with the knife he still clutched.

  “Help me!” she cried, astonishment mixing with her terror. “Help me, you fuck!”

  Her curse devolved into a shriek, as the aperture slid down to the front of the homeless man’s still kneeling body, his neck and part of his upper chest gone. As his arms shortened, drawn back into the hole like shirt sleeves pulled through themselves, so did her arms go with them. Her scream became muffled as she was jerked forward, her head plunging into the orifice as if she had willingly dived into it.

  “My God,” Mr. Pearson said.

  The lower halves of both bodies tumbled together in a confused tangle. The hole was now between the man’s legs, as if he were unbirthing both of them. Mr. Pearson watched his wife’s thighs squeeze through that stretched portal. Her calves slipped in smoothly after them, then her bare blood-painted feet, and then
a speeded-up folding inwards of the last rubbery flesh and the man called Donny was gone, too. All that remained where both had been was the pool of blood. Even Mr. Pearson’s flannel robe was gone.

  Mr. Pearson stood gawping at his reflection in the blood, and his eyes had filled up, because like his wife he had never felt so alive as he did tonight.

  ***

  Unlike Donny, Mrs. Pearson was not permitted to remain in the special place for good, so she came back later that night. Without Donny’s gift, however, her return passage did not go well.

  Mr. Pearson was still cleaning the basement, and trying to work out a plausible explanation for his wife’s disappearance, when he looked up startled to see her rematerializing.

  The thing that unfolded and grew before him was at first so amorphous, such a chaos of pink and red flesh streaked with yellow fat and unsolidified white bone, that he thought it was both Donny and his wife combined. But when at last the thing settled into its final form, if form it could be called, it was a low-to-the-ground blob with one of his wife’s legs hanging out here, a few fingers protruding there, and half her face near its center. Webs of her t-shirt and sweatpants wove in and out of her substance, and sprinkled across her mounded flesh were various odd creases and holes that probably didn’t correspond to her former openings, but for his purposes would more than suffice. In fact, after his initial surprise, he had never been more excited by her.

  Her single eye blazed up at him with what might be fury or madness, but she could only make a strange hissing sound through her tortured half-mouth. To her husband’s ears, it sounded like she was whispering, “dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk...” Ultimately, though, the meaning if there were one was inexplicable. Ah, the inexplicable!

  And here he had thought he would be limited to his memory of this night, and what little of the event had been captured on video; mainly the slitting of Donny’s throat.