He dreamt of an attic. Of course, it wasn’t a dream, per se. But Cam didn’t know that at the time.
The attic had a sharp-peaked roof, as if Cam were inside a perfectly triangular wooden prism. The point at the center of the ceiling ran from the stairs at one wall all the way to the small square window in the other. He wondered what the outside of the house looked like, if the roof was so sharp you could cut yourself along its edge.
The wood of the attic was unfinished, unsanded, splinterous, and rough. Nail ends jutted out all over. The room itself looked like a torture device. In its center was a faded pink sofa with wooden legs carved into human feet. The rest of the attic was bare.
Cam sat on the sofa’s middle cushion. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t blink. Across from him, about a foot off the floor, something was etched into the sloped wood of the wall. He managed to squint, and saw it was a man. Or . . . manlike. Minimalist, in thick, cakey yellow chalk. Two lines for legs, one down-swooping curve for each arm. And a ragged mass of spiked hair for the head. Someone had taken the chalk and scribbled it in an angry circle several times, digging in until the chalk cracked and caked in odd patterns. In the middle of this hair were two thick, slanted lines. Deep. Gouged hard into the wood.
The eyes hurt to look at. Like gazing into the sun.
Cam struggled to open his mouth, to speak, and as he did, the figure on the wall opened with him. The yellow chalk lines blurred. Beads of red popped like sweat from pores. Dark crimson fluid began to drain from the figure’s hair and eyes, to run across the floor in spidery tendrils, throbbing as they stretched in all directions. Fingers poked out between the boards of the attic wall. Dozens of black-clawed, gray-fleshed hands wrapped around the wood from the other side. Yellow eyes and puckered mouths, pressing up against the wall from within. Fingers yanking at the wood, trying to pull it apart, to pop loose all the boards upon which this figure was drawn.
The gummerfolk were coming through.
“Don’t,” Cam managed to say, the word molasses-ing out of him. “Dooon’t.”
But his voice was drowned by another. Someone he couldn’t see. Some booming, hell-thunder tone that read to him—the poem.
He’d remember it for the rest of his life, word for fuckin word:
The Shattered Man,
with wild hair.
You better run,
avoid His stare.
If you see Him,
you are through.
Cuz chances are?
He already
has seen
you.
On the final word, a board wrenched free with a snap. Fingers pulled it back into the darkness of the wall. And the gummerfolk began to slide into the attic.
If they had ever been human, they definitely weren’t now. Now they looked like someone had dug the bones out of regular people, held their skins to a flame, and watched them melt. Their shoulders oozed halfway down their sides. Arms bent out of their abdomens. Legs dribbled directly down from their ribs. Their heads rolled, sloshing against their chests. Their faces drooped and their waxy lips opened, closed, like fish on hooks,
choking on air. Their clothes were all askew, simple T-shirts and denim jeans, on sidewise and janky. Their hair was tufts of brown wire plugged into the warm clay of their scalps. The gummerfolk, an abandoned project forgotten in the cellar of the universe, squeezed their way out of this bleeding hole, one at a time, and spread like multiplying cells, expanding through the attic. Wobbling and sloshing. Some poorly made cross between a man, a leech, and one of those slippery snake tube-toys you find at, like, Rainforest Cafe.
God gave up while making these.
“Doon’t,” said Cam, more strained this time, like shouting through mud.
So many of them pouring through the hole. Warbling and swaggering around the attic. Aimless—until their eyes landed on Cam.
The first oodled its way around the side of the sofa. Its arms dangled at its sides, one twisted to the front, the other wrenched behind its back. It opened its mouth and ran its bugged eyes (one falling far down its cheek) over the entire course of Cam’s body. He could feel the eyes like snakes upon his limbs, slithering up and down. Tasting him. The gummerthing made slobbery, licky noises. Wavering side to side.
Then fell on him.
It smacked its mouth against the side of Cam’s neck, the fleshy bit with lots of strings inside. And it began to chew. To gum, really, because it had no teeth. It gnawed at him, very slowly. And as it did, Cam realized its lips weren’t waxy, weak things at all. They had muscle behind them. They were strong. It’d take a while, yes, but this thing was going to gum him to death, no doubt about it. In a matter of maybe two or three agonizingly slow, gradually more painful hours, Cam was going to die at the hands of a toothless leech.
Another fell upon his ankle, splatting prostrate onto the floor. It moaned with pleasure, and its eyes rolled in opposite directions as it sucked at the side of Cam’s foot, just over the big knob of bone.
Another fell on Cam’s arm. Its mouth began to work at the flesh inside his elbow. Gums clenching, squeezing, releasing. He could feel tongues rolling over him. Warm, wet slobbering. Their jaws were strong, so strong. But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t fend them off.
Another gummerthing tripped over the one on the floor and fell into Cam’s lap. It made an audible, cartoonish amph! as it chomped down on Cam’s inner thigh. Another leapt over the back of the sofa, nuzzled Cam’s shirt off his belly, and latched on to his navel. He felt the gums working at his gut. Squeezing, releasing. Squeezing, sucking, releasing. Nudging around
the organs inside.
Another fell on his bare toes.
Another swallowed his entire hand, knuckles grrrinding between its gums as its mouth squeeeezed . . .
At last, one of them waddled around behind him. He heard it crack open its mouth in a big, wet yawn. Drool dripped into his hair.
“Doon’t,” Cam moaned.
But the thing didn’t listen. Of course it didn’t. Why would it?
A great whoosh of air as it swooped down and took the crown of Cam’s head inside its jaw. It squeezed its gums around his skull and sucked. Some of Cam’s hair ripped loose, vacuumed away down its widening throat.
“Doon’t.” It slid its mouth lower. A snake shoving prey into itself. “Dooon’t.”
It worked its mouth down, lips wriggling over Cam’s eyes. He felt them squish back into his skull, the gums pressing, pressing. Everything went dark.
“Doooon’t.”
The mouth descended over his nostrils, practically breaking Cam’s nose up into his brain, grinding into the nape of his neck and his ears. All the while, more mouths fell on him, all over his body.
“Dooooon’t!” he cried as he sucked in air between his teeth. He took a big breath, and the thing swept its lip into his mouth, shoved his tongue back into his throat. It dug its own tongue into him, tasting him gag. It pulsed lower, mouth moving down over Cam’s chin, so that the suffocating, warm, wet flesh of its throat covered his entire face. He could taste its bile as it tasted him. Things in its jaw cracked as it widened, and prepared to take his shoulders.
Finally, the scream yawned from Cam’s chest in one big “DOOON’T!”
He was awake.
He lurched up in bed. The R train rumbled through Brooklyn’s underground, rattling the windows from far below. Lampposts poured a soft orange glow across the ceiling. Quinn snored gently at his side.
He was awake. And he was alive.
“Jesus,” he murmured. He took a shaky breath, rubbed at his eyes. Pain lashed through his skull. He grit his teeth, swore at the dim bedroom. He blinked hard, several times. He wasn’t crying. Something else was in his eyes. Something gluey? He held up his hand, pulled his fingers apart. Fluid separated between his knuckles in thick boogery strands. It was cold. Glacier-cold.
The fuck?
He blinked again,
and the poem blared in his mind.
He scrabbled for his phone on the nightstand and typed it all out, though the screen was blurred, his fingers sticky, his eyes throbbing horribly.
He felt like if he didn’t write it down, he’d die.
The Shattered Man,
with wild hair.
You better run,
avoid His stare.
If you see Him,
you are through.
Cuz chances are?
He already
has seen
you.
“Ew, why would you have jizz in your eyes?” Quinn asked, brushing her teeth in the open doorway between their bedroom and the bathroom.
Cam, still in bed, stared at the ceiling with bloodshot eyes. “Well, it’s not snot. It’s . . . rubbery. And sort of white.”
“You save any of it?”
“God, no.”
Quinn grunted around her toothbrush.
“My hypothesis,” said Cam, in his I have an MFA, therefore am smart tone that Quinn used to love and now didn’t at all, “is that it was a wet dream in addition to being a nightmare. That happens, right? You get so spooked you . . . cream the bed? Somehow, I’ve spooked myself into ejaculating directly up the length of my body, into my eyes.” He cracked his knuckles, pleased with himself. “My aim must be pretty good.”
“Ha. It’s not.” Quinn spat toothpaste into the sink. “Besides, your briefs aren’t wet. Are they?”
“Hm. True. They are dry.” Cam picked at his beard, thinking, as Quinn smeared on deodorant.
“Maybe something dripped down from the third floor,” he said. “A leak or something?”
Quinn glanced at the ceiling. “Looks fine to me. You google it?”
“It’ll just tell me I have eye cancer or something.”
“And you don’t think you have eye cancer.”
“Well, I hope not.”
“Then you know the alternative.” Quinn cocked her head, let that dangle for a moment, like he was supposed to fill in the blank.
Cam held up his hands. “I . . . do have eye cancer?”
“Ahh. See, this is a perfect example of the rule.”
“What rule?”
“Our rule. If anything creepy happens in the apartment . . .”
Cam groaned and rolled his eyes, which stung. He squeezed them shut. “Of course. We call the super.”
Quinn had a Q-tip buried in her ear now. She nodded. “Because Diego said the building might be haunted. So if anything happens we
can’t explain, we don’t be bullshit about it. Don’t say it’s the wind or some shit. Don’t say it’s an old building that leaks. It’s a fuckin ghost. If the question is, Is it a ghost? then it’s a goddamn ghost. We’ve both seen too many scary movies to be that kind of stupid.”
This was true. Ordering Indian food from the place down the block and watching bad horror movies was a favorite pastime of theirs. Cam claimed it was inspiration for his writing. But he’d left his laptop open the other day, and Quinn had snooped a little (how can you not?), and she’d discovered he hadn’t written anything new in months. He had been playing a lot of Skyrim, though. So that’s what he’d been doing while she was on the roof smoking cigarettes by herself, watching the traffic on the bridges to Manhattan, glittering in the murky night.
“So how are you applying the Diego Rule in this scenario?” Cam asked. “Did a ghost jerk off into my eyes?”
She sat on the edge of the bed, began to lace up her boots. “Who knows. Maybe you’re possessed. Maybe you came out of your own eyes. A braingasm!” She gasped, clutched his thigh. “New band name, I call it. Braingasm.” She went back to her boots. “Ya know, semen burns your eyes. Could be why they hurt.”
“Quinn, it’s not brain semen. How does that make more sense than—”
“It’s because your cornea’s made of the same cellular material eggs are made of? So the sperm just dig in there, thinking it’s—”
Cam buried his face in his hands. “Quinn, oh my god.”
She clapped her thighs, launched herself to her feet. “Look, I’m just sayin. If it smells creepy, it is creepy.”
“Well, just because the dude who sold us the apartment said it’s haunted doesn’t mean it is.”
A pang of betrayal needled up Quinn’s chest. “Cam, I’m ashamed of you, I really am. You’re mister big horror guy, and now you’re gonna say some dumb bull like, ‘Oh, the dude told us the apartment was haunted but I don’t believe him’?”
“But we’ve had no flickering lights, no . . . strange whispers . . .”
“Baby, you’re a strange whisper.” She leaned over, kissed his forehead. Really dug her lips into him to blot her lipstick on his skin. When she released him, he had a bright red Fight Club–style mouth just over his third eye. He looked cute, all blear-eyed and snug in bed.
“I gotta go help Kenz with inventory,” she said. “I love you, have a good day, don’t get ghosted.”
And she was gone.
Cam washed his eyes in the sink for the third time that morning. But the water made the sting worse. He felt like he’d coated his eyes in some acidic plastic shell. When he rubbed at them, they seemed to shift around inside his skull.
He sat at the little desk in their bedroom, opened his laptop. He eyed the Skyrim icon. Last time he’d played, the game claimed he’d logged over a thousand hours. That . . . didn’t seem very healthy.
So he cracked his knuckles. Opened a fresh Word doc. Picked at his beard. Stared at the blinking cursor. Rubbed his eyes.
And began to write.
The words came easily, for once. He found himself writing about the house under the attic from his dream. The man who lived there, one Frank LaMorte, had annihilated his family with a box cutter. All four of his children, peeled like bananas. When he was done, he took great dripping handfuls of them and painted a stick figure on the attic wall. An act so cruel and bizarre, it changed those wooden boards forever, warping them into a doorway to a nightmare realm. When the boards were pulled apart, the house painted over and thrown back onto the market, that blood-figure man was scattered into pieces, the doorway from His realm to ours—broken once more. He became angry. He became the Shattered Man.
This was the best work Cam had ever done.
But as he wrote, the burn behind his eyes grew worse. He could barely see the screen, his vision was so bad. Fat drops of cold phlegm curdled out of his eyes and spattered onto the backs of his hands as he wrote, and wrote, and wrote. He followed the story as it twisted in new directions, moving of its own accord. He’d always heard stories do that, but he’d never seen it firsthand. It was strange. Something was curling out of him, stinging his eyes as it needled its way out of its nest in his brain.
Weeks of this.
Quinn asked if he wanted to see a doctor. No, a doctor might cure it, and curing it might dry up the words. Cam adamantly refused, blinking and bloodshot.
Four months later, he had himself a novel. And as suddenly as it’d begun, the burning in his eyes? Gone, without a trace.
See? No doctor necessary.
Cam had exactly three publishing credits to his name before The Shattered Man. Three stories in semi-pro magazines that he should’ve been proud of but wasn’t. But he felt, finally, that Shattered Man was something important. At last, he’d written something that mattered. An entire novel! He just knew it was going to change his life.
Ohh yes. It would change his life indeed.
That was three years ago. Back when Cam and Quinn had first gotten their together-apartment, in Park Slope. Quinn liked the place because it got morning sun, and their windows opened onto the building’s courtyard, full of actual trees. She loved that she could fall asleep to the sound of wind in leaves, instead of the trucks and drunks along 4th Ave. She could walk along the entire roof, too, all around the building. She could see the Statue of Liberty, the far-off shimmer of the Chrysler Building . . . Cam spent his evenings bolted
to his desk, so Quinn got used to coming up on the roof by herself, with a cigarette and her father’s lighter, the Zippo with Marilyn Monroe etched in its side in Warhol colors. She’d put her Spotify on shuffle, stick in her earbuds, and watch the red and white lights tinkling in the polluted dark of the city.
Quinn was comfortable being alone.
Cam didn’t mind the sound of traffic at night. But he wasn’t born and raised upstate like Quinn. His parents worked at NYU. He didn’t know the music of peeper-frogs, trains howling at night through the woods. He’d gone north for his MFA at Branson College, in the mostly-nothing town of Furrowkill. There, he met Quinn (a junior and a theater major at the time). She’d clung to him because he talked about himself like he was important. Quinn felt like river debris at best, bobbing along through life without any direction except down. After they both graduated, he asked if she wanted to follow him back to the city.
“Cam, my hometown has only five thousand people,” she’d told him. “We used to have a bowling alley, and we used to have a Blockbuster. I’m from Leaden Hollow.” Grimacing like the name tasted how it sounded. “So yeah. I would love to move to Brooklyn with you. I could get involved in theater! Be in weird plays in black boxes downtown.” Which she never really ended up doing (the “weird plays” she auditioned for always seemed to require more nude monologuing and rolling around in milk than she was comfortable with), but it’d been a nice dream to cling to when she’d said goodbye to Leaden Hollow.
Quinn was done with Leaden Hollow anyway. Everywhere she went, she felt like she was kicking up a slow-growing layer of water and sediment. Like the place was gradually flooding itself with memory, as most small towns do. Cam was just an easy buoy to cling to as she floated away from home. She hated herself for those moments alone on the Brooklyn roof, when she yearned to go back.
Such a dirty fuckin trick hometowns play. You can’t wait to leave. Then they keep whispering your name on the wind.
They’d been dating for two years already when Cam had the attic nightmare. Quinn was so relieved. Cam had spent their first year in the city getting high and playing Witcher 3, sitting around saying “Roach!” in that white-haired dude’s gravelly voice. Picking at his beard on the couch, leaving coarse little hairs all over the floor. He’d smoke an entire joint, ramble at Quinn about how he could be the next Stephen King, then turn on the PlayStation. Again.
But the nightmare seemed to give him a new sense of purpose. Then he managed to sell the book to a small indie press—some bunch of nerds operating out of a refurbished cider mill in Vermont. Quinn had been stoked. Cam was invited to readings; he did interviews. It wasn’t a big splash, but it made him
happy.
Except Happy Cam was somehow even more smug and irritating than Unhappy Cam. Happy Cam berated Quinn for her taste in food, her music. He was now officially better than her, a successful novelist. And it stung. Especially when she pulled back from theater altogether, and became just another Brooklyn bartender with an abandoned dream.
When the indie press tanked, dragging Shattered Man down with it, Unhappy Cam reemerged, and Quinn remembered she didn’t like him very much either. He was bitter and cynical. Had zero ideas for future books. He slumped around the city for his tutoring job that he hated, grumbling about the SATs and ungrateful high schoolers. Schlepping brick-size test-prep books from apartment to apartment, having all these one-on-one sessions with sixteen-year-olds who couldn’t give a fuck, then coming home and demanding Quinn rub his shoulders as he rolled a joint.
Rinse and repeat.
She watched him sink into an irrevocable bitterness. This thing he’d believed would change his life hadn’t changed anything at all. He was just as unimportant as he’d always been. He hadn’t even written a word since that last cold tear dried up on his keyboard.
Quinn felt she could relate. Turns out, she didn’t want to grind through audition after audition. Kicking herself, for example, for missing an open call just because someone threw themselves onto the tracks of the F train up ahead. Sitting there sweating in the piss-stink of the subway car, clutching her old headshot, picturing the corpse-cleaners a mile up the track. Fuckin horrible. And she finally had to admit to herself that theater had never been that fun anyway, even in college, without Celeste. Celeste was the one who’d gotten her into acting in the first place. Back in the day.
So then . . . what did Quinn wanna do?
Good question.
Over time, Unhappy Cam became somehow . . . comforting. At least rubbing his shoulders gave her something to do. Lines to recite.
“It’s okay, baby,” Quinn told him, time and again as she dug into his muscles, staring over his head at Witcher 3. “You’ll write something huge one day. I know you will. I know it . . .”
Hoping desperately that this was true.
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