King Exercise II

Continuing my plunge into horror at the urgings of Steve King:


Richard needed to change the subject of this rambling self-dialogue. Taking a cautious sip of the tea, he spied the kitchen over the rim of the cup, his eyes falling on his book, then abruptly noticed something new next to it on the counter. He slowly walked over to investigate.

A package. Brown wrapping, tied from all four sides with a red-and-white string, and a little note stuck at the top. He opened and read: Mr. Davies, Enjoy! Emmie.

Richard smiled and immediately set about the task of removing the wrapping. Mrs. MacAffey had been here, all right, and she left him a box . . . of cookies. Presumably her esteemed homemade chocolate chip specials. God, he hadn’t tasted one of those treats since Thanksgiving – since their little dispute over pay and the regularity of her housekeeping duties. Savoring those chewy morsels dissolving in his mouth, he had to admit, somewhat guiltily, that the whole labor dispute was kind of petty, on both parties, but especially his.

Collecting the box of cookies, his Caesar tome, and his cup of steaming tea with just the use of his left arm proved almost impossible, but where there’s a will, or a growling stomach and hungry mind, there’s always a way. He fell in a bundle into his favorite armchair in the living room, a cozy little spot next to a bay window facing out into the backyard. He paused a moment to soak in the view: leaves leisurely blowing across the velvet-like grass, the late-winter sun slowly sneaking down towards the horizon, winding its way between some old dogwood trees that signaled the end of his property fifty yards away.

A yawn suddenly came upon him, and Richard stretched out, yawned again. The cookies proved too tempting and he found himself wolfing down three more in quick succession, each washed down with a few sips of tea. By the time he turned to the bookmarked page he noticed that twenty minutes had somehow slipped by.

Oh well, he thought. Still have two hours or so until Nell was due home. It was too long since he’d had the time to nap. Teaching, researching, writing, Sheryl, Nell . . . all had taken their toll on his body and mind. Never one to relish the thought of wasting precious hours of his life, he nonetheless decided it would be okay to snooze for a bit. Besides, tonight of all nights there was probably a ninety-percent chance he’d be performing mediating duties worthy of a high-level ambassador – between his daughter and his girlfriend.

He slept.

He dreamed – quite vividly for a man who claimed to never dream. It was a first-person dream; that is, he found himself moving from room to room as a movie camera would pan in and out on its unseen rollers. The house in this dream seemed vaguely familiar. The outlines reminded him of some other place, but the filler – the paint, wallpaper, pictures on the wall – the filler was odd. Unusual. And everything had a sickly, yellowish tint to it.

Then a sudden realization flooded over him. This was his house. The very house he was dozing in, only not in this present time. Eight years ago. He was dreaming of his house, eight years ago when they had first bought it.

He and his ex-wife, Jane, back in the days when Jane was well – or at least acted well.

They had bought the house on the cheap. Almost stole it. The owner was a man of minor fame in the town; an ex-councilman, in fact, as well as the owner of a John Deere dealership located just on the outskirts of the city, on Route 78. Yet in the house that the Davies had bought Mr. Chambers had lived modestly. And, it turned out, had also died modestly. Being a sworn bachelor and somewhat of a tightwad with his fortune, he had never created his own family and had alienated the one he was born into. So for sixty hot summer days the house served as Mr. Chambers’ casket. After this gruesome discovery, and after nearly a year of trying to fumigate the lingering odors of Mr. Chambers from it, the house was finally placed on the market at a very appealing price. A price which very much appealed to the Davies: husband Richard, fresh and ready to start at his new position teaching Ancient History at Shale, and pregnant wife Jane, eager to start her own family and continue with her fascination with all forms of cooking.

As his disembodied spirit drifted through the house Richard realized he was coming full circle. Back into the living room, the room Chambers had, the one he died in: the striped silver wallpaper, stained green from tobacco; the lime shag carpet, resplendent in dog-shit stains and old furniture depression-marks; the plastic-coated floral-printed sofa and love-seat.

But where Richard’s chair was, and where Chambers’ brown-patched La-Z-Boy should have been if this really was reverse time-travel, stood a cage. Its form mocked that of a birdcage: round base, tapering to a point at the top, only it filled the entire corner of the room. All the warmth in his body drained as if he had walked through a misty waterfall of ice-cold fog. Suddenly every muscle in his body froze; he found he could not move further any more.

To his deep dismay, the cage slowly glided toward him, great rusted invisible hinges shrieking as it gouged a path through the carpet, leaving trails of blood on the hardwood floor behind it. Richard tried to move back, but was glued in place, despite the odd feeling of having no body.

From somewhere a spotlight shown into the cage. Richard gasped.

He gazed at himself inside the cage.

It was him, yet to his uncomprehending mind it wasn’t. The man inside the cage wore the torn and ratty black-and-white striped uniform of a concentration camp prisoner. The specter hadn’t shaved in days – or slept in that long either, judging by the tea-bag sized black circles beneath his eyes. He was Richard, and tried pitifully to smile, but only revealed a toothless cavity that drooled some dark awful ruby-red substance.

A scream snowballed inside Richard. Yet one part of his brain still remained rational, and noted offhand that he had been screaming a long while now. Like the whistle of a train rapidly accelerating upwards in pitch and volume as it neared the station.

The eyes of the man in the cage pleaded to articulate something, but the more he tried to mouth words the more liquid oozed from that terrible dripping hole.

Richard was certain he began audibly screaming now. That rational part of his brain, now starting perhaps to get a little bit concerned, suddenly informed him that he was dreaming, and could wake up any time he wanted to now. Except, scream as he might, it found he could not.

Instead an invisible vice gripped him and drew him toward the cage, toward his mirror image. Agitated, the prisoner slapped both hands against the bars repeatedly, uttering harsh, apelike sounds. Richard’s “No! No! No!” soon fell into syncopated rhythms with the man’s. Finally, less than a foot away, the cage bars disappeared and he was close enough to embrace the repellent creature.

Great big rolling tears streamed down the prisoner’s filthy face. He stopped banging and reeled his hands slowly in.

Richard stopped screaming. All the volume had seemingly shut off, like a water spigot.

The man’s hands fell flush against his chest, then crawled down over his ribs, down to his belly, finally grasping the tattered ends of his death camp tunic.

Richard stared into the man’s eyes, those blood-shot windows desperately trying to tell him something, then glanced down to the prisoner’s gory, soiled hands.

In one quick motion the man pulled up his prison tunic, up over his chest, and straight up to his chin.

The man had no stomach.

Instead, a burnt cauterized cavity, blood and mucus and bile oozing among the shredded intestines hanging like stalactites from his ribcage. And more of that nauseous ruby-red bilge seeping out and burning the floor like acid.

Richard screamed so loud he jumped from his chair, spilling cold tea on the history book and overturning the empty cookie plate.

Almost immediately, he hugged himself, sweaty, trying to stop the shaking. Counting slowly to ten helped him calm his ragged breaths, and he kept his eyes focused on the floor in front of him, kept staring at that oriental pattern rug he and Sheryl had bought. No lime green shag carpet.

At last he felt calm, and loudly exhaled. “Oh man, oh man,” he muttered.

“What’s the matter, lover? Bad dream?”

He looked up. He screamed again.