It’s for the dogs, he thought. It’s just meat for the dogs…
Sensing yet another shift in his perception of reality, Robert stopped and swallowed hard. His mouth was dry; there was no spit to lubricate his throat. He turned and moved toward the bathtub; he was aware now of a slight sloshing sound, as if something was bathing in that tubful of offal. He stared at the meat; it reached almost to the lip of the old claw-footed tub. As his eyes adjusted to the mess, he realized that a shape was resting on the surface: it was a hand, the fingers smeared with congealing blood. It took him a moment to understand what was wrong with the hand. It had no fingernails.
Gently, he reached down and prodded the hand with his finger. It shifted slightly, disturbing the bloody, chunky fluid to reveal a body beneath the surface. He looked around and saw a toilet brush on the floor. He picked it up, trying not to inspect it too closely, and returned his attention to the bath. He paused a moment, and then leaned over and prodded the sticky meat, pushing it away so he could reveal the body beneath. The body turned, the hand slipping off the chest and a head rolling into view.
The face he saw was that of Sergeant McMahon, but, like the hand, there was something unusual about it, an unfinished quality. The face looked like an incomplete sculpture, where the clay had been shaped and molded into the approximation of human features but not yet teased into its final form. The nose was lacking apertures, the eyes were sealed tight, and there were no ears on the sides of the head. It was an image, a homunculus, a thing either frozen in the process of creation, or that of being deliberately unmade.
Sergeant McMahon, Robert finally realized, was not a man at all. He was a facsimile, a symbol, a shredded being pushed around the stage like a prop, a meat puppet designed for a specific purpose.
He turned away, retching but bringing up nothing from his cramping stomach. He dropped the toilet brush and lurched away from the bathtub, wishing he had ignored it instead of answering the call of his morbid curiosity. Some things, he thought, were better left unseen.
When he reached the door, he stood with his hand on the handle, afraid to open it in case someone was standing right outside, listening to him. The image gained strength, so much that he was forced to close his eyes and count to ten, hoping he could rob the idea of the power it had over him. If this was a novel, he thought, that’s exactly what would happen. But it isn’t a story; it’s real. I’m real. They’re real. Believe it.
But belief was something he was finding increasingly difficult to hold on to.
It took a while to accept his own argument, and even then he was only partially on-side. It was as if there would now forever be a part of him that would never quite believe in the reality of any situation, but would instead stand to the side, self-aware and aloof. If he survived this night, he would never again be able to rid himself of the notion he had been given a glimpse behind the scenes of reality, and that somewhere—perhaps down some deserted back alley, or behind a high brick wall—faceless writers and technicians were working hard to create the scenes he was living through.
He opened the door inward, fast and hard, holding his breath as its edge almost brushed his nose because he was standing so close. The landing beyond was empty. Again, the place had been wrecked. There were broken plates and torn-up magazines and newspapers (most of them red-top scandal-sheets, from what he could make out) scattered across the landing, and the pictures had been pulled from the walls. Wallpaper was shredded; carpet had been torn up and set fire to. It resembled a war zone, and Robert thought the comparison fitting.
He stepped out onto the landing, being careful not to tread on any loose boards. Light shone under a door opposite; one of the spare bedrooms, a guest room. He could hear nothing, so kept moving, putting one foot in front of the other and hoping his luck held. He kept to the center of the landing, away from the walls—and, more importantly, away from the doors. If anyone opened one of them and came out at him, he wanted to allow himself room to make at least an attempt at escape.
His shoulder ached, burning white-hot. Blood ran down his arm and dripped from his hand, onto the ruined carpet. Slogans had been daubed onto the walls in red paint (surely it could not be blood) but they were crude and meaningless, more like signs or sigils than actual words. Then, gradually, they became increasingly legible, and he was drawn to examine the essence of their meaning. The writing had grown smaller as he made his way toward the stairs, and the scrawl transformed into a recognizable language, illustrated with the occasional sketch.
Filled with dread, he read bits and pieces of the story of the Corbeaus: how they took children from suburban streets to call their own, how they travelled from town to town, place to place, to converge with certain points in a narrative written by whatever gods had shaped them. It was written in broad strokes, this plot, like the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, or messages inscribed on an ancient Egyptian tomb wall, but it was there if only you had the eyes to see it.
The medium that told the story was a combination of daubed text and crude diagrams not unlike those seen in prehistoric cave paintings. As he moved along the landing, he saw representations of himself, and of his family, of Sergeant McMahon, and even of the dog he had killed. The story ended at that point, the death of the hound, with the rest as yet unwritten. Disturbed beyond his capacity to understand, Robert spun around and glared into the shadows, fully expecting someone to step forward, paintbrush in hand, and finish the tale.
Light bled under the door he had noticed earlier; shadows trembled in the corners. But he was utterly alone on the landing. He looked again at the words and pictures on the wall, and the universe seemed to quiver above and around him.
He hurried to the stairs, filled with a sort of existential terror. Never before had he felt this way; he barely even understood what this kind of fear meant, or where it came from. He was not equipped to deal with such extremes, and his mind was buckling under the strain of even thinking about it.
Moving down the stairs, he tried to brace himself, to refocus on the moment. Something like that…it could cripple a man’s senses, turn him inside out. He needed to be sane, to be sure of himself and his intentions, but instead he found his mind was straining to fly toward the skies. He turned at the bottom of the stairs and crept along the hallway, heading toward the kitchen, and the back door. He glanced into the door-less living room, and what he saw there stopped him dead in his tracks.
Monica Corbeau was sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall. Her back was rigid, and her arms were held stiffly against her sides. She looked like a statue, a carved stone effigy. Robert was convinced she was not even breathing.
Dead, he thought. He’s killed her.
But as he stared, and studied her features, her posture, the way she was holding herself primly upright, he came to the conclusion she was in fact conscious…but she was not sentient. Her eyes were open; she had not blinked since he noticed her there, alone in the darkened room. Because of his stealth, she was completely unaware of his presence, and her condition had not been disturbed. He gripped the knife tighter, but in the face of such an enemy it felt useless and even slightly absurd.
It was as if, when Robert and his family were not around, the Corbeau family became inactive, seizing up as if petrified. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does that tree even make a sound?
The possible implications of this insight rocked him to the core. He could not understand any of it, but he did realize this meant the Corbeaus were his very own demons, linked to him alone, and they would probably not stop until he was dead.