The man in the doorway held an ax.
He woke up sweating, clutching his pillow as if it were a life preserver and he a drowning man who could not swim. He sat up, got out of bed, turned on the light. In the garage, he knew, the pieces of the boy's arm were lying individually wrapped inside a milk carton in the trash.
On the stove in the kitchen was the pot. And in the cupboard six boxes of macaroni and cheese.
He did not sleep the rest of the night but remained in a chair, wide awake, staring at the wall.
The next day was Monday, and Alan called in sick, explaining to his supervisor that he had a touch of the stomach flu. In truth, he felt fine, and not even the recollection of what he had ingested had any emotional effect on his appetite.
He had two eggs, two pieces of toast, and two glasses of orange juice for breakfast.
All morning, he sat on the couch, not reading, not watching TV, just waiting for lunchtime. He thought back on last night. The man in his dream, the man with the ax, had seemed vaguely familiar to him at the time, and seemed even more so now, but he could not seem to place the figure. It would have helped had he been able to see a face rather than just a backlit silhouette, but his memory had nothing to go on other than a bodily outline that somehow reminded him of a person from his past.
At eleven o'clock, he went into the kitchen to make lunch.
The face when it appeared was less ephemeral, more concrete. There were wrinkles in the water, details in the foam, and the accompanying change that came over the kitchen was stronger, more obvious. A wall of air moved through him, past him. The light from the window dimmed, dying somehow before it reached even partway into the room. He looked down. This face was scarier, more brutal. Evil. It smiled, and he saw inside the mouth white bubble teeth. "Blood," it said.
Alan took a deep breath. "No."
"Blood."
Alan shook his head, licked his lips. "That's all. No more."
"Blood!" the face demanded.
Alan turned down the flame, watched the elements of the face disperse. Details dissolving into simplistic crudity.
"Blood!" the voice ordered, screaming.
And then it was gone.
***
The shabbily dressed man on the street corner was facing oncoming traffic, holding up a sign: I Will Work for Food. Alan drove by, shaking his head. He'd never seen such people before the Reagan years, but now they were impossible not to notice. This was the fourth man this month he'd seen holding up a similar sign. He felt sorry for such people, but he wasn't about to let one of them work at his home and he could not imagine anyone else doing so either. For all he knew, such a man would use the opportunity to scope out his house, check out his television, stereo, and other valuables, casing the joint for a future robbery. There was no way for a person such as himself to check out the credentials or references of a homeless man. No one knew who these men were—
No one knew who these men were.
Blood.
He felt the urge again, and he pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket and turned around. He did not want to, but he was compelled. It was as if another being had taken control of the rational portion of his mind and was using the thought processes there to carry out its will while the real Alan was shunted aside and left screaming. He made another U-turn in the middle of the street and slowed down next to the homeless man, smiling.
"I need some help painting my bedroom," he said smoothly. "I'll pay five bucks an hour. You interested?"
"I sure am," the man said.
"Good. Hop in the car."
Alan killed the man in the living room while he was taking off his coat. It was messy and ugly, and the blood spurted all over the tan carpet and the off-white couch, but it had to be done this way. The homeless man was bigger than he was and probably stronger, and he needed both the element of surprise and the partial incapacitation provided by the undressing in order to successfully carry out the murder.
The larger man stumbled, trying to get all the way out of his jacket and free his arms to defend himself, while Alan hacked at his neck with the hatchet.
It was a full ten minutes before he was lying still on the floor, and Alan filled up the measuring cup with his blood.
The macaroni and cheese tasted good.
He had a hard time going to sleep that night. Though his body was dog tired, his mind rebelled and refused to quiet down, keeping him awake until well after midnight.
When he finally did slip into sleep, he dreamed.
Again, it was the man in the doorway. But this time he could see the man's face, and he knew why the outline of the thick body was familiar, why the contours of the form were recognizable.
It was his father.
As always, his father walked through the door, ax in hand, blood still dripping from the dark blade. This time, however, Alan was not a child and his father not a middle-aged man. The surroundings were the same—the old posters on the wall, the aging toys—but he was his real age, and his father, walking slowly toward him, had the dried parchment skin of a corpse.
With a sibilant rustling of skin on sweater, a sharp crackle of bone, his father sat next to him on the bed. "You've done a good job, boy," he said. His voice was the same as Alan remembered, yet different—at once whisperingly alien and comfortably familiar.
Had this ever happened?
He remembered flashes of his past, pieces of an unknown puzzle which he had never before stopped to organize or analyze. Had he and his father really stumbled across the bodies as they had both told the police? Or had it happened another way?
Had it happened this way?
The pressure of his father's body seated on the side of the bed, the sight of the dark bloody ax in his lap seemed familiar, and he knew the words that his father was speaking to him. He had heard them before.
The two of them said the final words in tandem: "Let's get something to eat."
Then he was awake and sweating. His father had killed both his mother and his sister. And he had known.
He had helped.
He stumbled out of bed. The apartment was dark, but he did not bother to turn on the lights. He felt his way along the wall, past furniture, to the kitchen, where, by the light of the gas flame, he poured water into the pot and started it boiling.
He poured in the salt and macaroni.
"Yes," the face whispered. Its features looked almost three-dimensional in the darkness, lit from below by the flame. "Yes."
Alan stared dumbly.
"Blood," the face said.
Alan thought for a moment, then pulled open the utensil drawer, taking out his sharpest knife.
The face smiled. "Blood."
He did not think he could go through with it, but it turned out to be easier than expected. He drew the blade across his wrist, pressing hard, pushing deep, and the blood flowed into the pot. It looked black in the night darkness.
He realized as he grew weaker, as the pain increased, as the foam face of his father grew red and smiled, that there would be no one left to eat the macaroni and cheese.
If he had not been so weak, he would have smiled himself.
And I Am Here, Fighting with Ghosts
I've always liked this story. It was rejected by nearly every magazine on the planet before finally finding a home, so maybe my perception is skewed and it's really not very good. But it has resonance for me because it's essentially four of my dreams that I altered a bit and strung together with a loose narrative thread. I stole the title from a line in Ibsen's play A Doll's House.