Randall didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there, staring at the wall. It hadn’t moved and neither had he, for hours it seemed. He would sit there for many more, if he could. His bones felt heavy and he had no real desire. Sometimes, if he waited just a little longer, his momentary awareness of his situation might pass. But not now. Not tonight.
She would call for him again tonight. She would peek half of her yellowed face out behind the doorframe and call those dreadful words.
"Randall, it’s time.“
He wanted to hate that. He wanted to hate her for making him hate it, for making him do it. But these days it was such a chore to feel much of anything, even hate. It was much easier to just do what she asked and when it was done he could sit, leaving the horrible squalor of this reality behind. But in these sour moments of awareness, of real thought, he was mortified at what had become of him. And what was becoming of her.
"Randall, it’s time.”
He leaned in his chair and looked down the hall. His eyes caught Greta’s face peeking out from behind the doorframe and, for an instant, he saw a sparkling reminder of who she used to be. A dark twist of hair hung down the side of her face, curling in the hollow of her cheek. A flicker in her grey eye. Was she smiling? No. Nor did her skin seem as vibrant as a moment before. Her eye had gone flat as the walls. She was growing impatient. He made his slow, uncertain rise from his creaking, wooden chair and moved timidly toward the hall. Greta retreated into the dim light of the bedroom. His legs awakening from a deep sleep, he found it difficult, painful even to creep as he did. He could smell the room at end of the hall, past their bedroom. He knew he would have to clean in there again soon.
Randall stood in the doorway, his eyes adjusting from the dark hall to the smoked yellow light of the bedroom. How odd, unwholesome it seemed to him now. He only came in here when she called on him for this task. He wasn’t allowed in here at any other time. Hadn’t been since they’d found that first one, years ago, not long after their first child was stillborn. It was her room, not theirs. She had been in here ever since. Piecing together nonsensical devices of what exact purpose or nature, though he had his suspicions, Randall could never quite discern. Nor did he wish to. He left her meals and the materials she requested outside the door. He was supposed to deal with the tenants and the delivery boys. It was his job to pay the bills, maintain the apartments and their bank account.
He dared not tell her how five of their eleven units had been trashed and abandoned for months, how he had not replaced the tenants and had not bothered to clean. He never spoke to her of the buildings structural problems or the hate mail he received with the existing tenants’ rent checks, calling him a slumlord, complaining of rats and snakes and untraceable, fetid odors. It was his burden to bear, not hers. That was the way she wanted it. That was part of his duty as her husband. Part of his penance for having sperm that gave her a dead child. The dead child that gave her the hollow grief. The grief that caused her condition.
He looked at his wife, lying stiff, naked on the bed. She had grown _so_ very thin. He hoped it was only the room’s lighting that made her skin look that way. Like jaundiced ash, parched and cracking. Only the light that made her eyes seem to recede, her belly so sunken. But he knew from the large remains of her barely touched meals that she hadn’t been eating well. Leaving the meat, hoarding the bones.
She stared at him blankly, with her flat, cloudy eyes and slightly ajar mouth, as he wearily undressed beside the bed. He didn’t want to look at her. His eyes pretended to scan the room, but he didn’t really want to see anything else in here either. Old and newly fashioned instruments littered the tops of small tables and shelves and spilled onto the sticky floor, all bearing the slightly disturbed aura of recent use. Bizarre contraptions formed from greasy animal bones, broken mouse traps and baby doll parts, glass ampules filled with dried, white carcasses of strange, many-legged bugs, and the reconfigured innards of countless dismantled music boxes. He had never told her about the similar items he’d found and half-heartedly toyed with in his meandering inspection of the vacant units. He never asked her what these things were for or what caused her to build them. He didn’t want to know what she did in here. He didn’t want to know the morbidity that had afflicted his wife with its touch. He didn’t want to have any understanding of why the air in this room was thicker now than in the rest of the apartment, why the walls seemed so… damp.
He heard a splashing sound near his wife’s head. Greta’s eyes never moved from him, or the indefinite point in space she was staring at beyond him. He looked past her to the nightstand and for the first time, he saw the jar. He wished he didn’t know what that abhorrent thing in the jar was. Didn’t want to know anything about what it meant that it was writhing in the yellow fluid the jar contained on their nightstand. But he did. He had known before she had even called his name.
She had coaxed another one of those damned things out of the wall. Kept in her own urine. Blessings, she called them. As was common of these matters, his stomach sort of lurched when he saw this one. He thought that it must have over sixty of those ugly, little eyes. All of them tiny, black, festering, jiggling beads, all engorged in a headskin plum of smooth, purple fat, all leering at him, laughing. He could taste the putrescence of their lust at the back of his throat. He knew he had been promised to it. His muscles tensed and puckered as he watched it swaying its dark, eel-like tail through the yellow liquid, flexing the opulent rings of thorny spines that stemmed from just below the rim of its disgusting, bulbous head.
"Touch it.“ Greta commanded through tight, barely open lips. As if she thought she might tear her paper skin by opening her mouth any wider. Randall timidly did as she asked, hoping this would be all it took. The past couple of times it hadn’t been enough. He’d had to do the other. The thought made his testicles feel weak and sick.
All it had taken was a touch, when they found the first one sticking out of the wall that day, years back. Back when he still had a couple of vertebrae and some scattered remnants of dignity. Before she had torn it all from him. He had put death in her womb, she said. Worthless, dead sperm that she swore she could still feel clinging to her insides. Infuriating excuse for a man, spilling his loveless poison inside of her. That was it. He hadn’t loved his wife enough to keep their baby alive. It was his fault. She told him their daughter’s name would have been January. Did he know that? Did he care? she’d screamed.
Randall knew that the moment he heard his wife speak their stillborn daughter’s name was the same moment that he lost the ability to gain an erection. And her resentment of him grew into a continuous assault on his manhood. "If you could call it manhood.” she’d said. Pathetic, ugly, puny, limp, dead chickenskin. Any real man could not only get it up and give his wife the beautiful, living baby she deserved, but could give her an orgasm in the process. Randall had never even done that for her, she told him. And he probably never would from the cancerous rot between his legs.
Randall would just sit there. Day after day, wishing she would stop driving these guilt-tipped nails into his skull. Wanting to lash out at her, scream, something. Yet, he seemed only able to sit there, staring down at his hands in his lap. He knew she was right. It _was_ his fault. Him and his defective equipment.
The day that they had found the first of those horrid little creatures, Greta had been in the process of, yet another, discourse on his seemingly boundless inadequacy. She had been so infuriated with him. She had smacked his face three times. And when he did nothing to stop her, she grabbed the object his fingers had been fiddling with and smashed it against the wall. Only when dead, twisted tones began to chime, light and sick in the rage-heated air, did she realize what she had broken. The little music box Randall had bought for her and for their child when he found out that she was pregnant. Once upon a time it had played “Somewhere, My Love”, but as it laid there in pieces, the hollow, tin garble that was plucked from it shrieking, as the coil unwound, was unrecognizable as any but the most torturous music.
This, he knew, would also be his fault. His head sank further into his rib cage, like a turtle retreating into its shell, as he prepared for Greta to spew another unfaltering torrent of blame from the bottomless well that she held in her heart. And, perhaps, she had started to do just that, but few words escaped her lips before she fell into silence. Something else had captured her attention. Over the tops of his eyes, he saw her jerking her head to look around, sniffing at the air or cocking her ear, as if she were trying to capture some distant noise beyond the mockery of the music box ruins.
He looked up at his wife, almost questioning why she’d stopped. Not that he wasn’t grateful. Greta put a finger to her lips and hushed him, even though he had said nothing. He waited for a moment, confused. Her eyes darted, searching. Then, from some indistinct place, some vague corner of the apartment, he heard it. Like a wet finger skating the rim of a wine glass, yet it left the image in his head that the glass was screaming.
Out of the corner of his right eye, he saw something. On the wall. A shadow. Moving. Gone. He tried to look straight at it and it vanished. No, wait. Over there. And another on that wall. And in the hall. The walls seemed to be dampening. Though the direct line of his vision still feigned the relative normalcy of a minute before, the horizons and conjunctions of his eyelids told him differently.
Everywhere in his periphery the walls were crawling, swarming with slithering, dark things, wormy shadows gaining a slow, apparent solidity. His nose was invaded by the scents of licorice, and of rotten cherries, snagging in his throat like noxious, bitter thorns. The screams of the wine glass evolved into a small, backwards, tittering kind of laughter. And the air grew more dense by the second, as if a sort of fog, tepid and invisible, were settling into the apartment. Thick and stifling, making it hard to breathe.
Randall looked into his wife’s bewildered eyes and she into his. He remembered feeling nauseous, more than just to his stomach. Sick to his soul. Their mouths fell agape with want of speech, but their voices had run from their throats thin, formless. Too hard to speak. Difficult enough to breathe. Just breathe. In. Out. That’s nice. Sighing. So nice. Soothing. Comfortable. Their heads grew heavy and began to loll to the side. Staring at one another, sighing together rhythmically, up to the disfigured, final note of the unwound movement. As the storm of discordant melancholia receded, so, too, did the shadows dissolve into the walls. The fog lifted instantly. The sickly sweet scents of filthy candied things departed from their olfactory. The laughter into a whine. The whine into a hum. The hum into silence. As their normal senses of awareness returned to them, their eyes searched the room for some, for any explanation of what had just happened.
Greta saw it first. On the wall, by his desk, something like a large slug. They moved closer to inspect it. Smooth, slimy, but not a slug. Not a common one anyway. Neither of them had ever seen a slug with a posterior of plump, fingerlike tubes that degraded into wet, stringy tendrils at their ends. And never one so bright a gray. Randall had poked at it with a pencil from his desk a few times. It didn’t move. Greta had said maybe it was dead. He agreed. He got the point of the pencil underneath the thing, trying to pry it from the wall. It fell. And he caught it.
He hadn’t intended to catch the thing and he thought that his immediate reaction should have been to drop it. But when it was there in his palm, he realized how much he had wanted to touch it. It had seemed so soft, pliant. Its texture, so full, voluptuous, like the flesh of a baby without muscle or bone. And the gray of it, the rich, sensuous gray of it. Warming in his hand as he stroked it with his thumb. The strangeness of it faded. He turned it between his fingers like a bauble, coming to the conclusion that whatever it was, it was not a whole animal. Where he had pried it from the wall, there was some kind of ruined, fatty material, like a mangled slice of orange and of similar color. And even that had its allure and its rewards for touching it.
He had squeezed it, played with it, wondering what it tasted like, wanting to feel it give between his teeth. Greta looked at him in shock, but her disgust was only feigned. She shook her head and screwed up her mouth when he said she should touch it. But it didn’t take much persuading to make her giggle at the grossness of it and admit that she wanted to know what it felt like. He held his hand out, offering the thing for the approval of her senses. She placed her middle finger on it, letting it slide down, petting it, petting as he took hold of her other hand and moved it to his groin.
She looked up at him wide eyed and a smile crept up her face. Her eyes narrowed and she squeezed his erection hard. He grinned. She licked her lips. They kissed with more passion, more lust than in the whole of their relationship. Tempted to bite each other, wanting to eat each other all the way to the bedroom, clothes quickly becoming scarce.
Randall remembered that day. The first time he had imagined his wife without bones. A gluttonous, floppy, quivering form of tender moldable flesh, easily contoured to his every desire of her. A pillow of meat in his mind. He could not break her, no matter how hard he threw himself into her, pounded her or beat her with his body. There was nothing to break. And how he wanted to devour that slutty, boneless, debased thing.
Randall remembered that day. All it took was a touch. The next morning she had told him she was pregnant. She knew it. He doubted that she could know, but she insisted. And indeed she was. It wasn’t so important while she was pregnant, that he couldn’t get it up anymore. They barely wondered what had become of that precious gray slug. They were going to have a living, breathing baby and that was what was important. Until the baby came, living, breathing.
Randall looked now to the wretched, new wall thing in the jar on their nightstand. His knuckles were white around it, like he was trying to strangle it. It only pulsed and lengthened. His eyebrows wrinkled as he looked down in horror at the shame of his flaccid penis hanging like a dead worm. His eyes, welling with tears, turned up to Greta’s. Hers said “You’re weak.” Her frail, dusty form lied there stiff, unmoving, yet brimming with contempt. He began to cry, simpering and sniffling.
"Pathetic little boy,“ her voice was full of gravel and glass. "Be an adult, Randall. An adult man knows what has to be done and he does it! So don’t just stand there and piss yourself, you scrawny little shitbag. Our perfect child is waiting. Don’t you want January to be with us?”
Randall gripped the walldweller in the jar good and tight. He would do it. No matter how degrading. His fleeting manhood could suffer another blow just to quiet her and relieve himself of this accursed awareness, returning him to the elysian fields of his chair, his wall, where a thousand music boxes played at once behind visions of a happy life, a beautiful daughter and a healthy wife. He removed the creature from the liquid and bent at the waist, facing away from Greta. Randall looked down at his feet, watching stray tears splash on his toes. Greta looked at the ring of ten festering, upraised sores around his anus and smiled as her husband plunged the squirming blessing inside himself.
Randall could feel its sharp spines extend and puncture him. He couldn’t remove it now if he wanted to. But he didn’t want to. The nectar was seeping in. She could see its dark, slippery tail still protruding from him. He turned to her, his eyes alight with an animal ferocity. His erection was raging. She spread her legs with several creaks and pops. He mounted his wife’s breathing corpse, glancing for only an instant at her flaking, yellowed vulva and its sparse, patchy hair before punching himself into it. Dry and rough as sandpaper. It scraped him and hurt, but that was of no matter now. The thing was driving him into her, harder than was possibly comfortable. She just lay there very still. A peculiar cleft was developing on her face, denting the tip of her nose and drawing in her chapped upper lip, revealing the cakey gum area of her most recent tooth loss.
He saw how easily her face could cave in. How kissing her would be like having a mouthful of ashes. He could feel, he could hear her bones clanking together as he assaulted her, as the creature assaulted him. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to fuck and crumble her little body of brittle chalk into dust and powder. And she just lay there, expressionless, emotionless. He couldn’t hurt her. He couldn’t please her. He didn’t care.
He came like he was pissing away his awareness into her parched vagina. For a moment, he let his body relax, felt the limp, walldwelling thing slip out of his clutching anus and gave her the full weight of his body. She patted him on the back.
"You did fine. You did fine, Randall.“
He knew there was condescendence in her voice, but what did it matter? Again, it was done. That was all she needed from him. She said nothing more to him as he climbed off her, gathered his clothes into his arms and walked out, shutting the door behind him.
He leaned against the door, in the dark light of the hall, listening to the quiet sobs and mewling coming from the room at its end. He could hear metal clanging, scraping against metal. They were waking up, moving around. The stench was becoming overpowering. He strolled into their room to see how big of a mess he would have to deal with. They would probably be hungry. He hadn’t made them any food in a while. They began to grunt and hoot when they saw him. They moaned and tried to rattle their cages with drooly, unfinished limbs. Their toothless mouths gummed shapeless greetings and hopes that their father had brought them some sustenance.
Randall looked at the six cages, three stacked on three, and the ominous empty seventh, waiting, with its door sprung open. He gazed upon his children, hairless, sweaty, wriggling, slopping in their own excrement. Each one misshapen, malformed, oddly goatish, calling for him with their sickly bleats. He could never seem to remember their names anymore. Oh, the burden of memory, slipping, like everything else. The one with the head like a bloated prune, he thought, the one with the filmy eyes, the absent spine. That was the first one, he was sure. Little Randy Junior. Didn’t seem to be moving like the others. Just sort of lying there, shaking. The gnats swarmed by his thick lips, lapping up the foamy, pooling spittle. Must still be asleep. Probably in the midst of some spastic dream. He could scarcely remember if either he or Greta had bothered to name the other children. This next one could have a name. This one might be January.
Randall looked down at his sorry member, dangling, he thought, like a drunk’s head after a vomit. Burning like that. He yawned a heavy lungful of fetid air, bundled his clothes tight against his naked stomach, hugging them pitifully and turned to leave the room. Maybe this one wouldn’t need to be kept that way. Maybe it would be normal. Maybe it would be perfect. Just like Greta wanted.
For the moment, he was tired. He wanted to rest in his favorite chair, in his favorite place, in front of his favorite wall. He didn’t feel like cleaning in there just now.