He took another stab that morning at cleaning. It shouldn’t have been necessary, but dust seemed to come out of nowhere to spoil the rooms. The floorboards weren’t tightly fitted—dust from the crawlspace underneath seeped through. Dust also came down from the ceiling, from the flaws at the corners and the holes where plants once hung. It came back as fast as he wiped it away. Dust also issued from the loose-fitting windows and from under the front door. Many of the yards in the development had gone back to bare ground and now the wind was redistributing them.
He stayed away from the windows, not even wanting to look. Sometimes outside there were old house facades that shouldn’t have been there, and slanting shadows from tall houses torn down decades ago. He could see the way the light shifted inside as the outside world impossibly changed—and if he were to look out he’d have to doubt his own sanity.
He still had seen no teenagers, no children of any kind, but he heard their feet scuffling outside, and the ragged sounds of their breath as they ran away. Where were their parents? Where were anyone’s parents? No doubt hiding beneath their beds. At least the cats he’d seen had left him alone.
As if in answer his own bed creaked and something shifted in the light, but Simon refused to turn around. If he just kept his mind on cleaning he would be fine.
Early that afternoon the clouds lifted and light glared across the bedroom ceiling. He witnessed the vague lines in one corner of the heavily textured surface, the slightly depressed outline of a trapdoor into the attic.
It made sense, of course. Each of these houses would have some sort of attic. He could see a fuzz of lines along one side of this small hatch—cobwebs or insect legs or simply an accumulated string of dust hanging down. Perhaps if he removed some of the attic dust he wouldn’t have such a dust problem below. And besides, there might be things put away up there and forgotten, treasures no one remembered.
He had no ladder, but he could slide the bed into the corner. From there it was a simple matter of standing and pushing the panel up and to the side, and then the strenuous but doable labor of leveraging himself up into the darkness.
He saw no treasure, but copious amounts of dust. Much of it had accumulated into furry mounds in the corners. He caught a glimpse of daylight, and shifting himself for a better view saw that a corner of the attic had been damaged, rotted out all the way to the outside air, ragged as if chewed.
Long, coarse hairs from the mounds glistened, moved. Then one of them shuddered, and a ragged gap in the middle opened wide.
Simon dropped back onto the bed, hastily fitting the panel back into place. Over the next hour he rummaged through the junk in the closet, finding a few strips of metal he could screw into the panel’s edges and secure it to the ceiling. He slid his bed back into the middle of the room and lay there watching the fastened ceiling panel. At one point the metal strips might have wiggled, but that might have been his eyes and nerves fraying from staring too long. Outside the teens ran around the house—he could imagine bands of them looking for trouble, or was it the pets they’d left behind? He was too old and too nervous for this. Tomorrow he would hike out of here and visit his cousin. Thank you and sorry and thanks but no thanks. He wasn’t sure if he’d tell him what he’d seen and heard. Old men had been locked away for less. He fell asleep pondering if there was anywhere else to go, and dreamed of being dragged screaming from his bed.
But he woke up still in his temporary house and on his temporary bed. The ceiling panel remained safely in place. What was different was the redness of the room, as if Simon were seeing it through a veil of blood. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. The intense redness still permeated, brighter near the window. He slid off the bed and fumbled the curtains aside.
A glorious scarlet sunset had swallowed the world and retrieved the tall old grandfather and grandmother houses from his childhood. The residents were outside shouting their enthusiasm as they walked toward the center of the development where the air was brightest, as if the sun were descending at that moment into their neighborhood. He could see little more than their rapt and shiny faces, the rest looking thin and dark as lamp black. His eyesight was clearly fading. He knew he would see nothing of the new world now.
He wasn’t sure what to do but couldn’t bear the thought of remaining in this cramped little hovel with all that human activity going on outside. Why had they hid themselves away from him? One glimpse from their hiding places should have told them he had neither the inclination nor the ability to do them any harm. And with those things in the attic he felt safer outside. He jerked open the door and hurried out, determined to get a good look and become a part of whatever was to come.
A few of the neighboring ranch homes appeared unchanged, but as Simon followed the stragglers toward their brilliant destination he saw that the remainder had gradually warped into two stories or three or four, the walls stretched vertically thin to transparency, as if they were decaying upwards into these phantom rectangles with deteriorated regions allowing the night sky to show through. In some places a bright oblong of window appeared to float high in the air with a shouting person inside, with no discernible supporting structure around it.
He turned to the rioter next to him to share his amazement—it was an old man gone to crumbling cinders from his ribcage down.
Turning the corner he came face to face with the blackened crisp remains of youth gangs, shouting and punching those around them even as they had fingers and limbs flaking off. At the block’s center a hollow building displayed a boiling fire inside, dozens of those furry bodies exploding out from its blazing core like flaming cannonballs fashioned of fur.
They had their dirty, dirty hands all over him, their sooty clothes reeking of smoke and booze and the stench of new-fangled habits. He tried to reason with them but discovered he no longer spoke their language. There was nothing he could do, it seemed, and when they dragged him into the flames he found he no longer wished to resist.
Graverobbing Negress Seeks Employment
Eden Royce
I pried apart the corpse’s lips, their slackness telling me she’d been dead more than two days, and worked the tip of my finger inside her mouth. It opened enough for me to wedge the funnel in, its tip clinking on her teeth. I tipped my porcelain-lined hip flask—metal was a no-no—to spill the tea into her mouth. She didn’t have to swallow; enough would make its way down for the magic to work. I leaned back from the shallow hole she lay in, my aged joints protesting something fierce, then recapped the hip flask before hiding it away with the funnel inside my stocking. Wasn’t nobody looking up these skirts.
Tonight was kind. The temperature along Charleston harbor had dropped, creating a soupy fog the moon couldn’t quite cut through. Enough light to see my way home, but too little to give busybodies a clear view. My ear was always open to the rustle of feet or the clop of hooves approaching, except I wouldn’t have to worry about avoiding carriages tonight—those horses’ eyes weren’t good in the dark no way. Even so, I looked around me as I crouched on the pile of fresh turned dirt next to her, waiting.
She stirred. A brief jolt like she’d been run through with a tease of lightning. When her eyes opened—the first thing they all did was open their eyes—they were just starting to turn milky. I took her hand and helped her rise from the pit she’d been thrown in.
“Come on, honey. Maybe in your next life, you’ll learn to pick better men.”
Her dress was ripped, exposing one small breast; her hem was stained stiff with blood and fluids. Did the best I could with arranging the little coils of her hair to cover the angry rope burns around her neck and the hole in her skull, ’cause tea don’t fix everything. I wrapped my cape around her narrow shoulders and leaned her back against a tree while I filled in the hole. Then we started walking, her with an awkward bow-legged hobble and me not much better.