I stood there, and I stared at the porticullus, and I stared into the abyss and I knew it was staring back at me, eyelessly, infinitely.
My arm moved without me, and it reached the bell, and against all of my power and will I rang.
Three times the bell rang.
ding
DONG
ding
DONG
ding
DONG
The gate creaked wide.
“Oh HIIIIII! THERE you are, ohcomein, it’s SO nice to see you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Harvest,” I said, as I was dragged over the threshold in a cloud of dread fussing. My hair was adjusted before my very eyes; my raiment tweaked; my glasses straightened.
“OhmyendlessnessyouaresoBIG now, ahahahahahhahaha, oh myyyyy. Look at you!”
“I can’t without a mirror, Mrs. Harvest,” I told her, and she burst into laughter that only ended as she felt the terrible tug of her duty at her ankle.
“Oohhhh, THERE she is. Say hello to Bethany, Teresa!”
Eyes the size of dinner plates stared at me, half-shielded behind tremulous, quaking hands. “donwanna.”
“Oh c’mon, be poliiite. Be a good girl. You know Bethany! She lives just down the road! She’s your babysitter!”
The hands balled into little fists. “donwan.”
“You’ll have a LOVELY time, I’m sure.”
“dw.”
“Now, Bethany: the others are upstairs in Julie’s room, playing, and you shouldn’t need to do much for them beyond feed them – I left some shepherd’s pie in the fridge from last night and you can reheat it for them.”
“d.”
“Alright now, we’re leaving. You have a good time up here, and help yourself to anything in the fridge once the kids are in bed, okay? You’re a growing girl, right?”
Her elbow was icy cold against my ribs, stirring permutations of my own mortality.
“Thanks,” I said. “Have a good night, okay?”
“You bet!”
And with a last hug and a fare-thee-well, Mrs. Harvester, Mr. Sower, Mrs. Sower, and Mr. Planter descended into the basement of the Harvester’s home, where the walls were ringed with unspeakable things and the floor was covered in glyphs that must not be described, all in colours of the farthest rings and motes.
The door went ‘clik.’
Teresa stood there in the middle of the floor, staring at me without looking.
“Hey,” I said.
She immediately began to cry.
*
There are many opiates available to soothe a troubled mind. In the cellar below us were dozens of potent toxins that could flay a soul free of its physical ills for all time; in the world around us were uncountable distractions and vices.
I had brought with me some cheap hard candy, which Teresa was induced to consume. She couldn’t cry and chew at the same time, though from time to time a small and trembling snivel would leak out of the corners of her jaws.
Still, she was tamed enough to be carried, and I ascended the steps to the dwelling-chamber of Julie Harvester, currently inhabited by herself and Jonathan, her brother.
They were screaming words at each other. Harsh, rattling syllables whose power made my soul quail and will shake. But I had a duty, and it lay before me. Emboldened by my intellect if not my will, I threw the door wide.
“Fart face!”
“Douche turd!”
“Shit nose!”
“Knock it off,” I intoned. “This doesn’t look like playing to me.”
“He touched my stuff!”
“She wouldn’t let me touch her stuff!”
“So you just took it!”
“I was just looking at it!”
“It came off!”
“It was garbage!”
“YOU’RE garbage! SHIT garbage!”
A terrible power pulsed at my temples and I felt my vision grow grey. There were forces here that were neither benign nor hostile; merely aberrant to all that I could comprehend in the context of a reasoned universe. There was only one path out of the insanity that surrounded me.
“Let’s watch a movie,” I said.
“I want Fr–”
“I WANT Go-”
“We’ve seen that!”
“We’ve seen THAT!”
“You’re dumb!”
“You’re STUPID.”
“Perhaps later,” I told them. The bell had tolled. The time had come. “Let’s get you guys dinner.”
*
The shepherd’s pie was rank with implications. It seethed with a sickening intensity that nipped at my eyes and watered my soul.
“Gross,” said Jonathan.
“Ick,” said Teresa.
“I don’t want Shepherd’s pie AGAIN,” said Julie.
It was just as I had feared – my careful plans and safeguards so innocently conceived by confident mortal minds were in tatters, adrift in the face of the true nature of the chaotic universe. Emergency was afoot.
“How about mac n cheese?” I asked.
*
“Ugh….this is from a BOX,” said Jonathan.
“Eat it.”
“It’s ORANGE.”
“Eat it.”
“YOU eat it.”
Madness throbbed at my temples. “Alright. I’m going to give it to your sister. She likes it.”
“NO! It’s mine!”
I stared at the ceiling and marvelled at the most merciful thing in the world: the inability of a youthful mind to comprehend its own actions.
“Ecchh,” said Teresa.
I passed her a napkin.
“Bloorph,” said Teresa.
I stood up to find a damp cloth. Distracted on my task, heedless of the world around me, when I returned to the kitchen table I was not prepared by the magnitude of the horror that awaited my eyes.
“She tried to take mine!”
“She said I could!”
“Not if I ate it first!”
“You spilled it!”
“You made me!”
The orange. My god, the orange. It was everywhere. Everywhere. Under every thing and over every one and inside every dream and thought and hope, it crept, endlessly. I felt madness about to overtake me, and it was only through the very greatest effort that I did not begin to laugh uncontrollably.
“You will help clean this up,” I said.
Teresa coughed twice and threw up.
*
In hindsight my decusuibs were laughably optimistic; the wide-eyed innocence of a blind woman who cannot see the chasm gaping before her very tread. But I was naïve even of my naivety – as is so often the case – and so when I gave the children basic cleaning supplies such as mildly soapy water and some paper towels I thought to myself with the earnestness of the true fool ‘what harm could this possibly do?’
So I busied myself changing Teresa’s clothes, patting her back repeatedly, and putting her to bed in ignorant bliss.
By the time I returned with the mop to deal with her half-digested leavings, it was already too late. Too late for any of us.
Words could not describe what I saw. They tried their best, but in the end the truth of things could only be witnessed in the devastation.
It had begun as duty.
It had transformed into competition.
It had inevitably, loathsomely, fully transformed into immutable and eternal hatred.
And then, of course, had come the violence as humanity’s bestial nature overthrew reason’s paper-thin and infantile grasp on its brutish psyche.
“I’m bleeeeeediiiing!” wailed Julie.
“No you’re not! No you’re not!” yelled Jonathan. He was incorrect, but not by much.
“I’m gonna diiiiiiieeeee!”
“No you’re not!”
I recoiled in horror and shrieked with the voice of the eternally damned: “BEDTIME. Now.”
*
The basement door slid open. Foul vapours billowed forth, and in their gloom four hooded figures of horrific aspect slowly unmasked themselves.
“We’re BAAAA-aaack!” sang Mrs. Harvest. “Thank you SO much Bethany – how are the children doing?”
I steeled myself to the task at hand, carefully replacing the deeply illicit and highly salacious book on the living room shelf. It had been my only consolation since the cleaning concluded, and yet the fumes of apple-scented dish soap remained redolent and reeking within the inescapable confines of my mind.
“Teresa is sleeping; Jonathan and Julie were sent to bed early. Julie is watching a movie, I think.”
“What about Connor?”
I suddenly felt as if I were surrounded by horrifying implications I was not ready to understand.
“Connor?”
“Yes! Four children: Teresa, and Jonathan, and Julie, and Connor – you know, Mr. Tiller’s son. Five years old? Didn’t I introduce them to you?”
“No. You said ‘the others are upstairs in Julie’s room.’ And Julie and Jonathan were up there. And that was all.”
“Well, where could he have been then? Oh dear. I hope he hasn’t gotten himself into mischief. Always getting into things, Connor.”
A noise rose from the basement.
Something had bumped, lightly but forcefully.
“Mrs. Harvest,” I said, speaking quietly so that madness would not overtake me, “did you leave anything out?”
“Well, Connor, apparently.”
“No, no, no – did you leave anything out. Downstairs.”
“Oh no! Everything’s been put away carefully, I saw Robert lock the cabinets myself before we came back up. Except the nesting-shrine of course; that’s built into the floor. The Scrabbler of Old nests in there. But I’m sure Connor would never touch that; he’s such a careful boy!”
And then, from the staircase, the squamous, cyclopean, brobdingnagian, unfathomable, lunatic, unthinkable, wearily unmistakable noise of scuttling.
“CONNOR! Young man you are in BIG TROUBLE!”