Dwelling (22 page)

Whatever it was it had curled around itself. Its blubbery skin glowing against the flame of the lantern, shimmering in the murky liquid that contained it. It seemed to be all tail, some sort of worm or worse. Teeth, or perhaps they were small hooked claws, formed along the base of its body. Augustus pulled the glass jar closer to his face, peering into the murk.

It stirred.

Damn!

Augustus flinched. The jar shattered on floor. Brown liquid and glass purged in a wide wicked pool. He snatched the lantern and searched for the creature.

It was gone.

Where did it go?

Only a trail of mire was left in its wake.
Forget it. Just grab some jars and get back upstairs. Get drunk and forget about this place. I’ll go to town tomorrow. I’ll leave this house, this cellar, for a day. Maybe the fresh air will do me good?

Augustus filled his arms with as many food containers he could manage. He thought about the grain and decided against heaving the weight. Not with the stairs. Not with his damn prosthetic. He clinched the lantern’s handle between his teeth and made for the staircase. He glanced back to the spreading murk and spotted a glint of light. Something was reflecting off the floor. Something he had not noticed before.

What is that? Could just be from the spilled water…no, too bright. There’s something there, something metallic; iron, maybe, or judging by the color, bronze.
Augustus looked up the stairs. The waning glow from the fireplace beckoned him to the safety and comfort of his living room. But below, his curiosity howled as a wolf in a sheep’s pen.

Damn!

He dumped his cargo by the stairs. With the lantern firmly back in one hand, he investigated the spill on the floor. With some difficultly, he crouched down on his knee. Using his free hand, he wiped away the dust and dirt that soaked up the brown liquid from the broken jar. Sweat beaded along his brow, dripping like the slow start of a storm. After several passes, the clumpy grime gave way to some sort of circular sculpture etched in the ground. Marked at the center was a symbol he’d never seen before.

No! I’ve seen this before
. Augustus searched his memory. It felt so close.
Where? Where have I seen this?
The answer balanced on the tip of his tongue, sat fat on the cliff of his nose.
Where? Where?
He thought and thought until—

Yes! The paintings…all of them. They have this same symbol. The men had it on their collars, like some pendant. In the scenery, the one with the dark black woods, it was carved…or rather painted into the trees. The buildings, etched. I thought it was maybe the artist’s signature, but it feels more like some secret whisper told over and over, unseen unless seen and then it becomes apparent, abundant. This symbol is everywhere here, all over this house
.

Augustus continued to clean, studying the symbol, marking it in his mind. Finished, he leaned back from the ground. The symbol was of a curved line, like a bowl, and above the bowl a circle. Inside the circle was some sort of strange lettering, almost snake like, which he had never seen before, in none of the books kept in the study or of the few he had read since childhood. The only familiarity to it was of the paintings he’d seen upstairs in the house. The entire structure of the symbol looked like a large disk protruding slightly from the ground. There was a pit gutted on one side, as if some sort of bar or rod could be inserted and used to remove it.

Could it be a manhole cover…?
Augustus picked at the pit, feeling around the edges.
Just like the ones being in installed in Houston before I left, just larger. You could fit two men down inside those holes. It’s nothing more than a sewer pipe feeding into some canal, or more probably, the nearby lake
. He looked around in the basement, using the lantern, and spotted a rod in the corner.

—Wait. Why am I looking for something to pry it open? Do I really plan to open this thing?

What else were you planning to do?

—Get drunk, of course. Why would I want to open this? If it even is a manhole cover. Why would I want to go there?

—Exactly, Augustus, exactly the point. Why indeed. Aren’t you the least bit curious? Don’t you want to know?

I don’t know…

—Come on. What’s the worst that can happen?

Searching in the dark with only the muted glow of the lamp, Augustus retrieved the rusted pry bar from near the corner with a box of other seemingly misplaced tools and returned to the disk-shaped cover. Taking a breath, he hissed, and went about the work of opening the metallic seal.

“Jesus, this thing is really on there,” huffed Augustus, struggling with the bar. He set the lantern on the ground and really put his weight on the rod. “Come on, come on.” Finally, something gave. A deep exhaled burp rushed up from the now opened manhole. The air was warmer than the cellar. The stink of rotting meat more nauseating than before, almost blinding. It was clear to him that whatever was causing the smell, it was coming from down below.
Maybe it is a sewer line,
but why down here and not outside?
And why so large a manhole?

Carefully, he picked up the lantern and shone it over the dislodged cover. The pitch black peeled away, enough so for Augustus to spot a set of stairs leading further down into whatever this was.

Is that stone? A stone staircase? Here? In the cellar? What in the hell is going on?
His curiosity faded against an onslaught of horror and dread. His imagination ran wild with thoughts uncanny. Having a sewer entrance in the cellar, as hard as that was to believe, was one thing, but this, a stone carved staircase? A staircase leading down into…
what?
Augustus leaned forward, balancing a hand on the cellar floor. He peered deeper down into the dank abyss, but the light from the lamp was too weak to penetrate the fade.

—Should I go down there?

Have you gone insane!

—Perhaps
, Augustus grinned,
perhaps
. Leading with his good leg, he dipped down into the opening. He gazed at the long pry bar lying on the floor.
Should I take it? For what purpose?
With his prosthetic he continued down the staircase into the dark, his shadowy silhouette cast on the cellar wall faded with each agonizing step.

CHAPTER 20

TOAST

Johnathan

The holidays were approaching, time with family and friends. Johnathan knew this and mourned. Perhaps somewhere else things were looking more festive. Maybe somewhere like in Des Moines, Iowa, families were carving pumpkins, planning costume parties, scrambling for babysitters. Leaves would be turning orange there. Piles collected underneath oaks to be jumped in, thrown about, and then raked back into earthly mounds. The taste of the air would be cold, but not unpleasant. Good weather for all things pumpkin flavored. Months that would lead toward snow and Christmas and Hanukkah and New Year’s celebrations. It was a blissful thought.

However, in Houston the leaves didn’t turn color. The ones that did wouldn’t change until at least December. And snow…well, forget about it. It never snowed in Houston. The occasions on which it did were very far and between. There was one instance which Johnathan could recall. It had been 2003 and Ricky and he had returned home from Basic Training at ‘Fort Lost in the Woods.’ It was the same year Karen’s grandmother passed, the one who lived near Jotham. Operation Iraqi Freedom started early that year too. It was also the same year
Freddy vs. Jason
had come out in theaters, much to Ricky’s lament of not being able to go see it on opening day. They’d be finishing AIT soon. They’d be at Hood soon after that. They’d be shipping out to the desert soon. It was a strange holiday, or so Johnathan remembered.

The very same could be said of this year.

Johnathan swirled the near-melted ice cubes. The two little frozen islands jingled against the glass, besieged by a sea of brown scotch. He took a sip and swallowed hard. The kitchen light was dimly lit. The hallway and living room lights were off. Ricky sat across from him at the table, pale in the glimmering moonlight that shone in through the blinds. He had a look on his face that reminded Johnathan painfully of their childhood, a look that distinguished Ricky forever as the joker, the kidder, the hardy-har-har guy who did the “okay” sign with his hand and when you looked through the circle made by his thumb and index finger he’d tap you in the eyeball. However, it was his eyes that made him an alien. Unnaturally white. He smelled like death.

He conjured the memory of Iraq and the civilian car that, due to stupidity or terror, had attempted to run up past a convoy of American soldiers. A .50-cal round measures the size of a large palm and what it does to flesh is indescribably horrible. Johnathan had seen such a thing, once. The remnants of the family who rode in that car reminded him of something he’d seen in a movie, one of those horror flicks Ricky made them all watch. The inside of the car was akin to a scene in
Hellraiser
, the part when Frank gets ripped apart by hooks. The odor was pungent, like strong BO but more sour. Regrettably, it was a smell, a memory he could never forget.

“How’s your drink?” asked Ricky, his voice the sound of gravel and murk.

Johnathan grunted. He didn’t want to give in. Not like last time. Last time he’d been caught carrying on with Ricky, the look on his wife’s face when she walked into the garage was something he never wanted to see again. It wasn’t pity or anything of the sort. It was fear. She was afraid and it broke his heart seeing fear on her face, the look of a woman walking in on her husband talking to his dead friend as if he were in the room.

She’d noticed the drinking too…

“Wish I could have one,” muttered Ricky in one of those ‘woe-is-me’ tones.

Johnathan slide the bottle to him and watched in horror as Ricky slid it back.
Am I watching this? Is this real? Did it really move?

“I’m dead, Johnny-Boy. The dead don’t drink. We don’t eat. We don’t fuck. We don’t do much of anything really…well, except annoy our friends and family.” Ricky had that jokester look again.

“Hadn’t noticed.” Johnathan shrugged.

“What good’s a drink, anyhow?”

“What good is there in haunting the living?”

“I’m sorry I’m being such a nuisance, Johnny-Boy.”

Johnathan glared and then took a much longer swig from his glass.

“Seriously, I am. Look, see my face. That’s my ‘sorry face.’” Ricky slapped the table, laughing hysterically.

Johnathan looked toward the hallway, worried for moment Karen or Tabitha would wake from all the noise, but then realized there was no noise. Ricky wasn’t real. He glanced back at his once childhood friend, the guy he’d follow anywhere. The tears that came could not be helped. They could not be fought. They came with as much agony as any soldier who lost a brother or sister. The pain came with both a feeling of sorrow and joy—rejoiceful that it wasn’t you; sorrowful because it wasn’t you.

“Hey, do you remember Foukes?” asked Ricky.

Johnathan dried his eyes with his sleeve. He took another bite of scotch.

“Come on, you gotta remember Foukes!”

“That sergeant from Second Platoon?”

“Yup.”

“What about him?”

“Did you hear?”

“What?”

“Foukes, man. Remember he married that stripper before deploying. Swore up and down he loved her with everything he had. She was his soulmate, or whatever. Remember that?”

“So?”

“Wow. You really don’t remember.”

Johnathan shrugged.

“Allow me to fill you in. Ole Foukes went home on R&R and found Mrs. Foukes pregnant…about a few months too pregnant, if you catch my meaning.”

“She cheated?”

Ricky touched his index finger to his nose.

“Well, Foukes was dumb enough to marry a stripper he’d only just met.” Johnathan took a drink.

Ricky grinned. “That’s not even the worst part. Ole Foukes comes back from R&R, still married, says he’d forgiven her, that he loves her too much to toss her sorry ass to the curb. A few months later…this is after our little incident…when…”

“…you died.”

“Yeah, that. Anyways, from what I’ve heard—”

“—how are you hearing all this if you’re dead?”

Ricky touched his index finger to his nose, the jokester smile a bright and eerily glow.

“Seriously, how?”

“The dead talk, Johnny-Boy.”

“What do they say?”

Ricky rolled his eyes. “Can I get back to my story or what?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay…where was I? Oh yes. Foukes swore up and down Mrs. Foukes didn’t know she was prego, didn’t mean to cheat, yada-yada. Several months later, after I got blown to shit and you got shipped up to Germany, Foukes got a letter from the missus. Apparently she’d met someone. The baby-daddy? Maybe. Not sure. But she wants a divorce, swears she can’t handle being married to someone in the Army. Can’t handle the deployments. The separation. Can you believe that?” Ricky slapped the table, amused with himself.

“Foukes got a ‘Dear, John,’ huh? That’s fucked,” Johnathan whispered, wondering silently if Karen had ever considered leaving him.

“What’s crazy is that Foukes didn’t even seem fazed. He would go on smiling. He was right as rain…
too
right. From what I hear, he had this wild gleam in his eyes, like those thousand yard stares you see in war movies. He’d just smile and mutter something cheerful about how they’ll work it all out when he gets home. And you can believe it too, looking in his eyes, that a guy like that
would
make it home and everyone around him would stick close, not because they liked him or anything but because they knew nothing bad would ever happen to him, no IED, no RPG, no mortar, no nothing.”

Silence crept between them for a short while. Johnathan imaged the worst things, imagined something similar to what he’d heard on the news about some Screaming Eagles coming home and killing their family. Not because they wanted to, but because they never left the war.

“Did he?” prodded Johnathan.

“What?”

“You know.”

Ricky touched his nose with his index finger.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Johnathan breathed in terrible awe.

He downed the rest of his glass and gazed at the bottle. He wondered how much more he’d have to swallow for Ricky to disappear. He hated thinking that, but then again, he was sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of the night drinking scotch with his best-dead-friend. It wasn’t normal, yet a sliver of hope bubbled up that Ricky would never leave.

“How did you know about Foukes?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“You said you heard about this after you died.”

“Yes.”

“You said, ‘the dead talk,’ well, who told you?”

“Oh. Mrs. Foukes told me.”

Johnathan spit. Lurching forward, he caught most of it in his hand.

Ricky was howling. When he slapped his knee it sounded wet.

“
Jesus
…” Johnathan moaned.

“Hey, what can I say? The dead talk, Johnny-Boy.
The dead talk
. You’d be surprised at all the different conversations I’ve had since
I
died.”

“I’m sure,” Johnathan said. He found his footing and stood, grimacing against the numbed pain on his residual limb and prosthetic. Ignoring his cane, he limped into the kitchen and took a glass from the cabinet. Returning to the table he dismissed Ricky’s curious gaze. He filled the glass with scotch from the bottle and slid it toward his friend.

“Have a drink with me,” he said.

“But…Johnny-Boy, I’m dead.”

“I know.” He raised his glass, swaying a bit from the heavy and humid pull of his mind.

The look on Ricky’s face was serene. The jokester was gone. Across at the table sat the Ricky Johnathan remembered most fondly, the leader of the
Suicide Squad
, the reserved teenager who wasn’t afraid to take risks, who wasn’t afraid to ask Maggie to the prom. The young man who had few reservations about joining the Army. The face that became the blank casket draped with the American flag with the weeping widow walking beside it.

As his dead friend raised the glass before him, Johnathan didn’t mind crying.

There are few secrets between the living and the dead.

He wished Ricky would never leave.

He wished he’d never leave Ricky.