The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (the two towers ebook .TXT) 📗

to fight the urge to pull away. “Tell you what? Why don’t we go out and do something fun today?”

He imagined going out with her like this and suppressed a shudder. She could shower and get dressed, run a comb through the limp carpet of her hair. But whatever her anchor was right now, she’d be dragging it along with her.

The word slid past his tongue before he could stop it.

“Are you and Daddy...getting divorced?”

And there it was.

The not-nice smile.

Two days ago, Michael went into the basement.

He stood at the edge of the old well and looked down. Daddy had told him not to do that, said the ground might be soft, but he did it anyway because Daddy was gone and Mommy was upstairs crying and no one cared what he did anymore anyway.

A perfect circle of darkness sank away into thick, meaty nothing. The brick-lined gullet was slick and moss covered, crawling with white things he thought were beetles. He could hear the papery rasp of useless wings, the click-click-click of brittle legs scrabbling against rock. He smelled blood and salt, heard the steady thud-cough of running water far below.

And splashes. Like something was thrashing down there in the dark.

He stepped back and looked closely at the stones ringing the well. They were covered with markings, haphazard slashes that took him a moment to recognize as the same patterns hacked into the baseboards.

He turned to go back upstairs, and his eyes fell on an old metal cabinet against the far wall. It stood next to a listing, wet-warped tool bench. There was something on one of the lower shelves, shoved way into the black cubby like a rodent hiding from the light. It was lumpy and misshapen, like an old pile of rags.

He went to the cabinet, knelt, and fished the thing out. It fell to the dirt floor and opened like a poison flower.

A wet, papery mask. Wrinkled like a brown paper bag.

Coal-black eyes like buttons, a face covered in waxy brown skin like paper, no mouth or nose or hair. Just a twist of frayed rope, hanging loose around the neck.

A laugh like wasps. Or like little white legs scratching across brick.

“I’m your new Daddy,” the thing says and Michael goes cold. “I’m your new Daddy, and I’m coming home!”

“Well,” Mommy said. The word came out measured, like there was a thought hiding behind another thought. “That’s entirely up to your Daddy, I guess.”

He looked down at his hands.

“Your Daddy…” she started, then shook her head and tried again. “Do you know what paranoia means?”

He shook his head.

“It means thinking something is true when it isn’t. It means…it means looking at a thing and seeing something else that isn’t there. Do you understand?”

Michael thought of the well downstairs. The mask. When he looked at it, what he thought he saw was the discarded skin of a snake.

“I don’t know.”

“Your Daddy saw something, and he thought it was something else,” she said. “And the thing he thought he saw made him mad. That’s all.”

“Was it something about me?”

She looked at him, level, and he watched gears turning behind her red-rimmed eyes. He remembered something his Daddy said once about his old boss, back before they moved. The phrase was passing the buck. Michael didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he got the basic idea. And he understood that Mommy was, in that moment, looking for a way to pass the buck.

But instead she just shook her head.

“No, it wasn’t something about you, baby,” she said. “It was something about me.”

Heavy footsteps suddenly clomped on the basement stairs, and Mommy smiled. It wasn’t the not-nice smile. It was wide and full of teeth, and it made her look like a lunatic. Michael saw in her eyes a strange mixture: relief, joy, terror, and something else he couldn’t quite touch.

“Look! He’s home now!”

And she was up off the couch, hastily wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, floating like ether across the old brown grate. Forgetting that there was no outside door to the basement, that Daddy always came in through the front. Up the porch stairs where Michael skinned his knee.

(I’m coming home)

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

It was too late, anyway.

Michael heard Mommy cross the kitchen, heard the basement door bang open on a squeal of old hinges. Heard it exhale a low, wet sigh and smelled the pit’s salt-blood breath, rolling through the house on a sour wave.

He closed his eyes and waited for the scream.

Cauterization

Mack Moyer

John prefers that I prepare the lines. His are always too rocky, too hard on the nostrils. I shake two big nuggets from the cellophane wrapper onto the nightstand and cover them with a crumpled dollar bill.

I lay my expired driver’s license over the dollar bill and massage the nuggets into a fine dust. It’s a skill, all right. Apply too much pressure and tiny chunks will burst out the sides. Too little pressure and you end up with a bloody nose.

John hovers over my shoulder impatiently as I cut the pile into two lines and roll the dollar bill. I snort my line first.

The crystalline blast sears my left nostril. In a moment, it will dissolve across a membrane and into my bloodstream. The uptick in my pulse rate will become an audible drumbeat. Emotional cauterization will ensue soon after.

John’s turn. He snatches the bill and snorts his. He’s greedy with his meth, at least as much as he can be; he paid for this batch, but he gives me the cash and I procure the crank through my dealer. While I don’t charge John for acting as a middle man, sharing the bag goes without saying.

I’ve got plenty more stashed away in the kitchen but John doesn’t know that, though he rightly suspects it.

The crank kicks in and John bounces across my bedroom, endlessly flapping his gums. Allison is getting worse, he tells me. Sleepwalking again. Dragged the kids