And that voice, whispering now, conniving and entreating. It drew me across the room to the loveseat, my arms outstretched, and how it thrilled me to take your neck between my hands, to feel my fingers dig into the soft, pale flesh beneath your high-necked dress, and squeeze. Squeeze and squeeze, nails biting, fingers gouging. Who knew then how thin and high it was, that neck, as delicately boned as a bird’s. Bones creaked beneath the pressure.
And then you were there again. Your eyes snapped open with dread of the terrible thing that was death, the cold of the grave and the voice that lived on the other side and the hatred everlasting. Your hands flew up to pry my hands away, weak, too weak. I had gifts of my own, you see: the strength of my hands and purpose, and that voice capering inside my head in joy.
You gasped.
“Maggie,” you croaked. “Maggs, Maggie, please—”
And then there were no words, just struggle. Your legs kicking. Your hands tearing at my own, your body heaving. Second by second, your strength left you. Your body fell still. Your hands fell away. Your body went limp. And gradually, gradually, your face took on a deepening blue cast.
You might have died then — the one true person I ever loved, and I would have exulted in it.
But the door flew open, and here was Leah, laden with packages, saying, “Oh, girls, you won’t believe such finery I got, and at a poor man’s cost—” Her voice breaking off like that. Hatboxes and shoeboxes and dresses on their woolen-cloaked hangers, fumbled from her hands.
She found her voice then, a rising note of panic, edged in hysteria.
“Maggs, Maggie! You let your sister go!”
And just that easily the spell was broken. I sagged, my hands as of their own accord unfolding from your neck, that terrible, alluring voice dwindling — but never fading — from my mind. I stumbled away in tears, retching as your own hands came up to your neck in wonder and dismay.
Silence reigned. Even Leah, gathering her packages, could find no words to speak. And as for Katie and me, we knew. No words were necessary. We knew what had happened — we had heard that hating voice — and though it remained with us for the rest of our days, never again would we speak of what had happened that afternoon, never again would we risk so deep a trance, never again surrender ourselves so wholly to the thing that lay in wait for us upon the other side.
Until now.
Emily sleeps over her needlework, the darkness deepens, the room grows cold. I hear a knocking in the distance, growing louder. And worse yet, a voice, guttural and full of hate, and growing louder.
Katie, I want to say, Katie, is that you.
But I know it is not. Mr. Splitfoot slouches toward us, battening upon half a century of belief and blood, waiting to be born.
My lifetime draws to a close. The year is 1893. A new era draws nigh.
We were girls. How could we know? Surely that is enough.
God forgive us both. God help us all.
What manner of doorway have we opened? What awful beast have we unleashed upon the world?
I foresee a century of blood.
THE GOOD HUSBAND
Nathan Ballingrud
The water makes her nightgown diaphanous, like the ghost of something, and she is naked underneath. Her breasts are full, her nipples large and pale, and her soft stomach, where he once loved to rest his head as he ran his hand through the soft tangle of hair between her legs, is stretched with the marks of age. He sits on the lid of the toilet, feeling a removed horror as his cock stirs beneath his robe. Her eyes are flat and shiny as dimes and she doesn’t blink as the water splashes over her face. Wispy clouds of blood drift through the water, obscuring his view of her. An empty prescription bottle lies beside the tub, a few bright pills scattered like candy on the floor.
He was not meant to see this, and he feels a minor spasm of guilt, as though he has caught her at something shameful and private. This woman with whom he had once shared all the shabby secrets of his life. The slice in her forearm is an open curtain, blood flowing out in billowing dark banners.
“You’re going to be okay, Katie,” he says. He has not called her Katie in ten years. He makes no move to save her.
Sean shifted his legs out of bed and pressed his bare feet onto the hardwood floor; it was cold, and his nerves jumped. A spike of life. A sign of movement in the blood. He sat there for a moment, his eyes closed, and concentrated on that. He slid his feet into his slippers and willed himself into a standing position.
He walked naked across the bedroom and fetched his robe from the closet. He threw it around himself and tied it closed. He walked by the vanity, with its alchemies of perfumes and eyeshadows, ignoring the mirror, and left the bedroom. Down the hallway, past the closed bathroom door with light still bleeding from underneath, descending the stairs to the sunlit order of his home.
He was alert to each contraction of muscle, to each creak of bone and ligament. To the pressure of the floor against the soles of his feet, to the slide of the bannister’s polished wood against the soft white flesh of his hand.
His mind skated across the frozen surface of each moment. He pushed it along, he pushed it along.
They’d been married twenty-one years, and Katie had tried to kill herself four times in that span. Three times in the last year and a half. Last night, she’d finally gotten it right.
The night had started out wonderfully. They dressed up, went out for dinner, had fun for the first time in recent memory. He bought her flowers, and they walked downtown after dinner and admired the lights and the easy flow of life. He took her to a chocolate shop. Her face was radiant, and a picture of her that final night was locked into his memory: the silver in her hair shining in the reflected light of an overhead lamp, her cheeks rounded into a smile, the soft weight of life turning her body beautiful and inviting, like a blanket, or a hearth. She looked like the girl she used to be. He’d started to believe that with patience and fortitude they could keep at bay the despair that had been seeping into her from some unknown, subterranean hell, flowing around the barricades of antidepressants and anxiety pills, filling her brain with cold water.
When they got home they opened up another bottle and took it to the bedroom. And somehow, they started talking about Heather, who had gone away to college and had recently informed them that she did not want to come home for spring break. It wasn’t that she wanted to go anywhere special; she wanted to stay at the dorm, which would be nearly emptied of people, and read, or work, or fuck her new boyfriend if she had one, or whatever it was college girls wanted to do when they didn’t want to come home to their parents.
It worked away at Kate like a worm, burrowing tunnels in her gut. She viewed Sean’s acceptance of Heather’s decision as a callous indifference. When the subject came up again that night, he knew the mood was destroyed.
He resented her for it. For spoiling, once again and with what seemed a frivolous cause, the peace and happiness he was trying so hard to give her. If only she would take it. If only she would believe in it. Like she used to do, before her brain turned against her, and against them all.
They drank the bottle even as the despair settled over her. They ended the night sitting on the edge of the bed, she wearing her sexy nightgown, her breasts mostly exposed and moon-pale in the light, weeping soundlessly, a little furrow between her eyebrows but otherwise without affect, and the light sheen of tears which flowed and flowed, as though a foundation had cracked; and he in the red robe she’d bought him for Christmas, his arm around her, trying once again to reason her away from a precipice that reason did not know.