New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

THANATRAUMA Steve Rasnic Tem

The limitless sky outside Andrew’s bedroom window was the hue of soured milk and mushrooms. It wasn’t an unusual sky for a cold, late autumn day, with the fallen leaves dark and shredded, streaking the lawns, turned into a decaying filth encrusting the edges of things.

Last night someone had turned over the trashcans put out for this morning’s collection. Up and down the street the large green cans lay on their sides, garbage spilling over the sidewalks and out into the lanes. He wondered who could have been so angry, or in these times was it a sign of the carefree? Everyone would think a gang of young people did it, but sightings of sick raccoons had been reported in the neighbourhood the past few weeks. Wasn’t it more likely to be one of them? A flyer stuck in his door had provided a phone number to call in case of a sighting, and a warning not to approach, as raccoons were known carriers of rabies.

To make matters worse, vehicles had driven through this cold variegated sludge and dragged the trash everywhere. Some of his neighbours were already out there vigorously trying to make things right. He’d neglected to put his own trash out; it slipped his mind regularly. Still, he needed to lend a hand.

But he hadn’t talked to any of these people since his wife’s passing. And now, several years later, how could he even begin? There was far too much that should have been said.

On such days he longed for snow to cover everything, to provide some semblance that the world had been made fresh. But more often than not the snow did not come, and he’d choose to close the curtains rather than look outside. Which he did now, in case one of his neighbours looked up at the window and saw him spying on all their efforts.

From inside his body came a soft noise like something breaking. He could feel his deadened flesh falling away, bones slipping and sour organs spilling out. Still, he managed to move forward despite his demise.

It bothered him, how sensitive he was to changes in the weather, to colours, to atmosphere and mood. It was hard to say how he really felt about anything.

He’d rearranged his bedroom several times in the years since Marge’s death. He’d first gotten rid of the bed and all the bedding. He’d given their daughters the chest of drawers, the twin nightstands, her armoire, her clothes and jewellery. They’d been happy to receive them, although they didn’t understand why he’d wanted to let her things go so quickly. He didn’t know how to explain, but he felt his life depended on it.

Later he’d removed key pieces from the living and dining rooms—the ones she’d liked the most—and given them to various thrift shops. He and his wife had had similar tastes so it was necessary to replace some of the furniture with styles not at all to his liking. He wanted no reminders. As a result, some mornings it felt as if he had awakened in a random hotel. Who had chosen such bland artwork? He must have ordered it online, although he couldn’t remember actually doing so. Desert scenes, mostly, a fried-egg sun over plains of crumbling whites. The American Southwest, or perhaps Australia, or some alien world.

Andrew went over to his dresser and sorted his prescriptions and supplements. He re-read the yellowing paper specifying the proper amounts. He had no idea why he couldn’t remember them, but he could not. He dutifully consumed his pills with three full glasses of water. He had no idea what might happen if he neglected to take them. He doubted that there would be anything dramatic, but he wouldn’t take the chance. His primary focus of late was to avoid suffering. His ancient physician had told him, “You’re actually pretty healthy, considering. Hell, you’re in better shape than me!”

His eyes began their involuntary flutter. He clutched the edges of the dresser as anxiety grabbed onto him and shook. Several bottles fell over, a half-empty glass. He would have a mess to clean up. “Nerves,” the physician called it. One of these bottles was supposed to take care of his nerves, but often did not. Of course, Andrew had never revealed to his doctor all his symptoms.

His hands appeared claw-like, the skin stretched. When had his wrists gotten so skinny? He’d been trying to lose weight, but feared that some of his weight loss might be involuntary. How could you tell the difference? He supposed if he suddenly died he would have his answer.

His vision blurred slightly. Great hunks of flesh began to disappear from his arms and legs. They looked like partially eaten chicken wings and drumsticks. It was enough to put one off meat, but he figured he needed the protein. He gazed down at his naked body. Numerous bits were missing, others dripping. He felt the beginnings of nausea, made his hands let go of the dresser, and ran to the bathroom.

Once he’d emptied his system sufficiently the visions disappeared. He stared at himself in the mirror. Mirrors had become largely useless. They rarely showed him anyone he could recognize.

He went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. He’d have to do something about the smell. He hated how his body smelled even at the best of times. He was tempted to crawl back under the covers but would not allow himself that escape. Again, he sensed that his life depended on it.

He should eat something, although he couldn’t think of anything he was hungry for. Something pre-packaged perhaps. Something processed to the point that it was no longer recognizable. Anything that didn’t look as if it had once been alive.

Marge had been unable to eat the last month of her life. Not crackers, not even gelatine. She’d put something in her mouth and chew but her throat would not permit her to swallow it down. She had simply lost all desire for it. Similarly, she lost all desire for his touches, his stories, his speech, their daughters’ speech. Marge could no longer bear to listen, and eventually, to talk. She began to live in a world where such activities no longer had meaning.

He struggled to understand and accept. They’d always talked things through, and when he’d promised to be with her until the very end, he’d assumed he would do so as they talked about this, about everything.

In the hospital they fed her this cream-coloured liquid in plastic bags through a tube leading into a vein above her heart. They’d sent her home with a supply of these refrigerated bags and shown him how to prepare and administer them once daily, how to attach the tubing and how to disinfect. They told him the bags contained a mixture of nutrients and chemicals. It filled their bedroom with a grainy smell. He recalled a similar smell when he’d been a young man working near a dog food factory.

Every day he would talk to Marge and tell her what he was doing as he prepared her daily meal: the steps required to reduce the chances of infection, the attachment of the tubes, the readying of the pump. Marge still had nothing to say, but periodically she would say “yes”—whether out of politeness or as some part of her own internal process he did not know. He was terrified, of course, of making a mistake, of doing something that would make it worse for her, but each day he still did what he’d been instructed to do. And her belly did swell over time, although he wasn’t sure that it was from nourishment.

Eventually Andrew dressed, got in his car, and obtained a burger and some fries via a drive-thru. Once home he pulled the meal apart and examined it: the bun had a plastic sheen and the perfectly circular patty resembled no meat he’d ever seen before. He gobbled everything greedily. The accompanying soda burned down his throat gratifyingly.

Although retirement required no scheduling on his part, no necessary destination or progress toward any sort of goal, no need to ever leave the house really, Andrew had still instituted a regular routine as a way of giving some minimal structure and meaning to his life. Meals and sleep occurred at the same times every day, as did reading the newspaper or a book, as did brooding, as did panic.

As it did every day following lunch the wallpaper in the living and dining rooms began to peel from the top, long curling bits dropping down to reveal great patches of black mould underneath. Wall board began to buckle and dark insects crawled out of the resulting gaps. There were drips everywhere as paste and paint began to liquefy. There were other things as well: vermin and tiny creatures he had no name for living in the walls, coming out to reveal themselves. But he never looked at these too closely as a previous glance had shown they bore the faces of dead friends and relatives.

Andrew made some coffee—hard to think of it even remotely as food—and carried it out into the backyard. He sat in an ancient wooden chair beneath a naked maple and drank it while gazing at the mass of wreckage the yard had become.

Marge used to spend an enormous amount of time out here; he had not. He’d hired a man to rake the bulk of the leaves and haul them away. Dead flower heads bent the grey stems of the ravaged beds leaving jagged ends pointing at the sky. A stiff breeze lifted wire-like branches and made them rattle, broken bits joining the debris piles beneath the bushes. He regretted not paying the man enough to simply take everything away.

Nature made its own trash, and it used to be Marge’s chosen role to deal with it. Andrew had become accustomed to letting it lay. Since her death the backyard had accumulated a collection of broken pots, ice-cracked plaster statuary, rusted garden implements, rotted cushions, and objects whose names and functions had escaped his memory. Marge would have been ashamed, and he was ashamed to realize her opinions were no longer relevant to him. She should have managed to stay alive if she’d wanted some say.

But was it really so bad? Andrew felt both drawn and repelled. Some day he might just take a nap out here, and whatever crawled his way was welcome to anything it could grab.

But he supposed it would be bad if his daughters found him that way. Perhaps he would pass away peacefully in his sleep. That’s what everyone hoped for, wasn’t it? No suffering, and a little bit of dignity?

When the visiting nurse first met Marge lying so quietly, making such a small shape in the bed, she’d said, “Your mother…” and both alarmed and angered Andrew had interrupted, “My wife.” Another time he might have been flattered, although now he could not imagine when.

After several weeks at home Marge entered a period of even more intense silence, and no longer replied “yes” to his recitation of her food preparation, nor did she ask him to adjust her pillows or apply ointment to her lips. She slept, or he assumed she slept. Sometimes he would ask her questions and she would reward him with a vague nod. Frequently he studied her for signs of breathing, and he changed her adult diapers as necessary, although she gave him only minimal cooperation. The nurse on her daily visits reassured him this was to be expected with the increase in her pain medications.

Eventually there came a day when the sounds of her breathing returned, but they were laboured, occasionally violent, and frightening. The nurse came to the house after he called, and let him know that again, this was normal, she wasn’t in any distress. This was to be expected as the body shuts down. The end would be relatively soon, so perhaps he wanted to call their daughters for a final visit?

Their daughters came, and cried, and left again and Andrew was left with Marge and her body and her breathing.

Andrew had gone downstairs to eat something. A can of tuna fish, which thankfully did not look like fish, but more like very soft, flavourful wood chips, like mulch for the neglected flower beds.

When he returned to their bedroom he discovered that everything was silent, back to where it had been before this last stage, and he felt almost relieved. He stared at her for a while, and unable to find those vague indications of breath, he approached, and lay down beside her, and touched her, and tried to gently shake her awake. He knew she wouldn’t come awake, but he still felt that was what he was supposed to do.

He needed to call his daughters, and then he would lie with her for a while until they came, but there was this stench, and he didn’t want his daughters to have to deal with that on their final visit. Marge would have hated that, and he thought he needed to do something, or else what kind of husband had he been, what kind of father?

He readied a clean diaper and some wipes, and he gently turned her, but hadn’t anticipated the imbalance she possessed now, or her inability to participate, and she flopped over onto her face and a kind of sludge flowed out of her mouth, the rank contents of her stomach he supposed, but he really had no idea. He was completely ignorant, and here he had made this terrible mistake, and it had broken him, what he had done, how he had let her down, and he cried out in pained confusion, and tried to roll her back as gently as he could, but nothing about her felt right or normal, and her chin went down, and now he had more to clean. So he grabbed every rag and towel he could find to soak it all up, blotting and wiping it away, crying and cursing himself, and what he could not wipe away he tried to find ways to hide by folding and bunching the bed clothes and towels around her, all of which he knew he must throw out once they’d taken her away.

Andrew must have dozed off outside in the yard, because suddenly he was blinking his eyes against the changing sunlight. The sky appeared to be melting, great gobs of it dropping away like soaked tissue wherever the sun broke through the clouds. But he was just tired. He never seemed to get enough sleep. He’d even forgotten how much he was supposed to get. What had his physician said? “As much as you can.” That old man was useless, but perhaps the appropriate physician for Andrew in this phase of his life.

It had been years since he’d had his eyes checked. No doubt his prescription needed updating, or did you reach a point where very little improvement was possible? Perhaps he simply needed more sugar. He looked at his wrist but he must have left his watch by the bed. Was that his hand with all the skin hanging from every finger, as if he had forced his way through a mass of cobwebs? He looked away and gazed at the lawn, where great masses of dirt were churning. At any moment he expected an arm to pop out of the soil.

He looked at his hand again. It was an ugly, emaciated thing, this old man’s appendage, but at least its covering of skin was more or less intact again. But he was alarmed at the apparent thinness of its skin—he could see almost every vein and joint. Sometimes as the body declines it breaks our sense of time. Had he read this, or simply experienced it?

Marge had always loved his body, or at least that was what she had said. Now he could not imagine how that was possible—he couldn’t stand the look of it, the smell of it. Did everyone else smell their own stink the way he did? He considered that perhaps they didn’t, otherwise they’d be unable to show themselves in public.

He heard a murmuring beyond the bushes from where his neighbours had their lawns, and lives. He tried to put down his coffee cup and climb out of the chair but the cup was no longer in his hand. He searched the ground around him but found only mushrooms, hundreds of them showing their dirty faces to the sky. Of course it was their season, but he hadn’t noticed them when he first sat down.

He stood and made his way across the lawn, walking carefully because he didn’t want to step on any of the mushrooms. Although he couldn’t imagine there being any danger in it the prospect repelled him. He almost stumbled over an old log by one of the dead flowerbeds. He remembered how he had placed it there under Marge’s instructions. Now it had dark, spongy pieces falling away and a spread of moss over one end. Moss crept up the bases of several other trees in the yard—some of it a bright, almost phosphorescent green, and some of it dark and dry-looking, like spreading patches of dead skin. The sight made him want to rub his arms, but when he tried it hurt, as if the skin were loose and detaching itself from the muscle underneath.

He thought of Marge, and how in her last days she had seemed this old, rotted log, and he hated himself for it. She had been his beautiful wife. Should he call the man back to remove this log, or would that only make him feel worse? Suddenly he was at a loss as to where he should step. A tumble of bleached flesh and internals had spilled from one of the flowerbeds, gummed together with translucent membrane. It smelled both sweet and sour. It alarmed him that he suddenly felt hungry, thinking of seafood, which at one time he had loved. He had an impulse to drop to his knees, bend and fill his mouth with its rankness. It was like leaping off a cliff, not caring at all.

He looked again. It was ordinary dead vegetation; how could he have thought otherwise? Nothing here that reminded him of human flesh, although there in one corner, sunlight stirring some cobweb, some network of filament, seemed vaguely familiar. He immediately looked away.

A sharp pain on the back of his right hand. He raised it, making a fist. Some sort of wasp was stinging the same place again and again, aggressive in its attack. Odd—he hadn’t seen any wasps in a few months—weren’t they out of season? It turned its tiny head and appeared to glare at him, its multifaceted eyes far bigger than they should have been. He shouted and shook the thing away. Now in terrible pain he stumbled toward the back door.

One of the outdoor lamps had separated from the wall and now lay in pieces to one side of the back door. Broken glass scattered like a spray of ice. When had that happened and why hadn’t he noticed it before? At one shattered end a pile of crushed insects—moths and mayflies and the like—lay with their bodies roasted by the bulb. More invisible flying things buzzed at him. He cried out and struggled with the knob, finally jerked the door open, slamming it shut behind him.

Both daughters stayed at the house until the hearse arrived. The nurse had given him some names of funeral homes, and once he’d made his selection she made the initial call. While his girls cried over their mother’s body he waited in his study. He thought he simply wanted to honour their privacy, but in a moment of clarity realized he couldn’t bear to witness that moment. He had no idea if this made him a bad person or not.

When the men arrived he went downstairs and let them in. He was surprised to see their black suits and ties, and the long black vehicle parked in his driveway. Andrew wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected, but he hadn’t expected this TV-like scene. They were quite circumspect, and one practically whispered that they needed his signature before they could come inside. He signed, but did not read the paper on the man’s clipboard. He showed them upstairs, and they said hello to his daughters. The one who had done all the talking said the family might not want to be in the room as they removed the body. His daughters insisted on staying, while he retreated into the room next door. He stood there, waiting, unable to sit down. He heard a sliding sound coming from the bed, and one of his daughters made a sudden, soft sob. He did not know what she had seen, and would never ask.

It had been explained to him that the transporters would take the body to a central place, a “hub,” where it would wait with other bodies until picked up by the designated funeral home. He could not imagine such a place, and he knew that Marge would have hated the very idea.

In his bathroom Andrew poured disinfectant over the sting, and then waited there cradling the injured hand with the other until it stopped burning. Then he took a long shower. He’d started taking multiple showers every day after Marge died. He wondered if that was bad for the skin. He really should look it up. It wasn’t that he felt dirty, or in any way unclean. He simply liked the release it gave him. There seemed to be a kind of exchange, the heat, the liquid passing into his flesh even as some aspect of his flesh—some tension, some secret—passed into the water, striking the tiles beneath his feet and disappearing down the drain. He wondered if it were possible to stay under the water for so long the body eventually disappeared. He would have to look that up as well.

When the snow finally did come it was almost a surprise. It filled the sky rapidly with bits of white—as if the world were rapidly disintegrating to reveal the blank backdrop beneath. Andrew wandered from window to window, opening all the curtains, eager for some new view. Snow quickly packed the lawns, piled up against the fences, gathered along the edges of limbs, highlighting then weighing them down. By the time it stopped late in the day there was at least a foot of heavy, wet snow, maybe more. The world lay hushed and lifeless beneath its sheets.

Inside the house the rooms filled with brilliant snow-glare. There was nothing flattering in its revelations of dust and grime accumulated since his wife’s death, the spaces left empty from furniture removed, the aging stacks of laundry and unopened mail. Had he really been living this way?

He glanced out an upstairs window into the back yard. Snow had erased almost everything, an emptiness bounded by fence. But there, a man was climbing over his fence, his face turned up defiantly in Andrew’s direction.

He pulled on his slippers and raced down the stairs. He grabbed the poker from the fireplace and went through the porch and the door and into the backyard. He kept the poker raised, stepping awkwardly through the snow, watching for the man’s footprints. The snow was churned by the fence, but Andrew could find no distinct trail.

His feet were completely swallowed up by the white, but he didn’t really feel that cold. There was a chill, certainly, stiffening his skin and making him blush, but nothing that he couldn’t handle. He’d handled so much already, and he was doing just fine, wasn’t he?

The old chair under the maple had finally collapsed, pieces of it protruding above the snow.

He wasn’t sure where to go. He heard a terrible sound of breathing behind him and swung, throwing him off balance, sprawling into the snow. Something dark and furious leapt over him, attaching itself to the fence. Andrew jerked his head up. An old man was perched on the top of the fence, staring at him. It didn’t seem possible—surely that fence was too flimsy to support the weight of a man. And yet there he was, staring at him wide-eyed and shaking. Andrew felt suddenly weak and dizzy and struggled for breath. His chest felt as if it might erupt.

Then the old man turned his head, changing into a raccoon, its long tongue hanging out. Was it ill? Andrew didn’t even know what he was supposed to look for.

The raccoon bounded from the fence and landed beside him. Andrew covered his face, but the raccoon didn’t touch him. He heard it race across the snow, scramble over something, and then nothing. But Andrew still kept his face covered, listening, refusing to move until he’d heard something more.

“Sweetheart,” he said after some time had passed. “Please.”

There were the sounds of distant traffic, the soft whisper of wind across the snow, a dripping suggestive of an imminent thaw, and then, possibly, yes.