In this part of the city, even small, dingy apartments cost half your salary, and Jeremy resented every square inch of it and told himself daily he’d get a new place once he made it. Sandra was the only light in the place, when her duties allowed her.
Castoffs scavenged from sidewalks and alleyways, milk crates, cinderblocks and undistinguished planking mocked a furnished home. For now. Each new find, each duct-tape repair, each stolen light bulb from a public toilet, “for now.”
Jeremy had left before dawn that morning, shouldering his raincoat on and stuffing a cold bagel between teeth barely unclenched. His first job of the day was cleaning up at the high school — just a half-shift, most of it before the kids arrived. After, he changed into different coveralls and accompanied his friend Brett in his cleaning van on various tasks around the city. They specialized in emergency cleanup — scrubbing soot from the walls, cleaning up water damage, making places livable again after some minor disaster sent the residents to a motel for the night.
It was dark before Jeremy returned, rain-wet, smelling of smoke and soot. He fumbled his keys from his pocket and opened the door.
It was darker inside than in the corridor. Sandra must still be out.
He stepped in and pulled the chain on the overhead light, but there was only the click.
“Shit,” he muttered, and reached into his raincoat pocket for his weathered old Zippo.
On the third strike it lit; Sandra was home after all.
In the quivering glow of the Zippo’s flame, Jeremy saw his wife’s face floating in the darkness. “Sandra, honey? Why are you sitting there in the dark?”
He stepped toward her and felt something soft and wet under his heel.
“What … what’s going on, Sandra?”
He didn’t stop: he had seen something in Sandra’s face. Something wrong. Something he couldn’t quite —
“Oh … my … God …” Jeremy’s voice faded as he spoke, anyone listening would not have heard the final word.
Sandra’s face shone in the dark — but it was not attached to her body. Five silver nails pinned it to the wall, dark blood glistening, reaching for the floor where her body sprawled, peeled like a fruit. The sofa had been shoved to one side and the carpet pulled up, and she … her body sat, sprawled and skinned in a pool of blood and offal on the bare planking.
The posters had been torn off the wall she … her face … was pinned to, and something seemed to shimmer there, like writing in clear mucus, reflecting the flame as he moved toward his wife’s remains.
“Shit! Ouch!”
The Zippo had held its flame admirably, but he’d stood there, arm upheld long enough for the metal to heat, to burn his hand, to penetrate the thickness of the fog he stood in.
His body, newly-alert, vomited up everything in it until he found himself kneeling, gasping, canned stew and bile mingling with the slaughterhouse smell he had refused to notice when he entered the apartment.
Blindly, he stumbled into the kitchen and tried the light switch there.
No good. The whole apartment was out.
Second drawer down, amid stray toothpicks, plastic bags and bottle openers was an aging half-pack of birthday candles.
The lighter, dropped and with something dark now scorched onto its side, had cooled enough to handle, and he lit three candles and stuffed them into the soil of the brittle potted plant on the TV.
He could see the rest of the room more clearly now: he could see the characters written on the wall in a circle around Sandra’s face, her blood and entrails covering the rest of the room, scattered about, draped from the ceiling fan, puddled on the floor.
And Jeremy ran.
Jeremy ran out the door, down the stairs, out into the night. The city’s noise was muffled in the rain, the sidewalks deserted. Heedless of where he was going, Jeremy ran. He splashed through puddles and streaming gutters, gasping and stumbling, mindless save for the urge to get as far away as possible from the horror in his apartment.
When he ran out of road he skidded to a stop at the waterfront. The rain hissed into the bay, tinked and clanked on tin roofs and steel ships, and in the distances a sound like a dying cow announced the arrival of a barge to pick up the city’s garbage for delivery to a landfill island that would one day become a park.
Winded, Jeremy sagged against a pylon.
It can’t have been real. These things happen in horror comics. In B movies. Not life.
He must have imagined it, a hallucination fed by stress and sleeplessness, projected onto the dark by his unconscious.
The reality of what he had seen faded, and as the rain dripped from the end of his nose he laughed at himself.
Stupid.
Sandra is still at work, right?
All a waking dream. Best get back and get the super to handle the blown fuse.
And calmer, more slowly, he walked back to his apartment for the second time that night.
He was within two blocks of home when he first heard the sirens.
Fire trucks.
His home.
No … the candles?
Jeremy walked toward the burning building and was stopped by a policeman.
“I live here.”
“I’m sorry, but until the firefighters clear the building, you’ll have to wait here. For now.”
Haunted Spoons 