Visible Filth

by Nathan Ballingrud

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Media Tie-In; Horror

Synopsis

“Elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.” —Victor LaValle, award-winning author of The Changeling

This gripping novella of terror by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud is the basis for the film Wounds starring Dakota Johnson, Armie Hammer, and Zazie Beetz!

An eerie dread descends upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in the novella “The Visible Filth,” which has been adapted for film by director Babak Anvari—premiering at the Sundance film festival!—and starring Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, and Zazie Beetz. Wounds will release on April 12th, 2019.

Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press

Print pages: 80

Sample

The Visible Filth

The Visible Filth

The roaches were in high spirits. There were half a dozen of them, caught in the teeth of love. They capered across the liquor bottles, perched atop pour spouts like wooden ladies on the prows of sailing ships. They lifted their wings and delicately fluttered. They swung their antennae with a ripe sexual urgency, tracing love sonnets in the air.

Will, the bartender on duty, stood watching them, with his back to the rest of the bar. He couldn’t move. He was bound by a sense of obligation to remain where he was, but the roaches stirred a primordial revulsion in him, and the urge to flee was palpable. His flesh shivered in one convulsive movement.

He worked the six p.m. to two a.m. shift at Rosie’s Bar, a little hole-in-the-wall tucked back in the maze of streets of uptown New Orleans, surrounded by shotgun houses sagging on their frames, their porches bedazzled in old Mardi Gras beads and sprung couches. The bar’s interior reflected its environment: a few tables and chairs, video poker machines lined up like totems against the back wall, a jukebox, ranks of stools against the bar. He often had the misfortune of minding the place when the roaches started feeling passionate. It happened a few times a year, and each time it paralyzed him with horror.

At the moment Will’s only customers were Alicia, a twenty-eight-year-old server at an oyster bar in the French Quarter, a longtime regular, and his best friend; and Jeffrey, her boyfriend of the moment, soon to be hustled into the ranks of the exes, if Will knew her at all. Jeffrey was one of those pretty boys with the hair and the lashes she liked, but he was not on her wavelength at all. Will gave him another month, tops.

“This place is disgusting,” Alicia said.

“Don’t slam the bar, babe,” said Jeffrey. “It’s just bugs.”

“Fucking gross bugs who want to get busy on my bottle of Jameson.”

Will just nodded. It was, indeed, disgusting.

“You should get an exterminator, brother,” said Jeffrey. “Seriously.”

The same conversation every time. Just different faces. “Yup. Talk to the boss.”

“You know they say when you see one, there’s thousands more in the walls.”

“Oh yeah? Is that what they say?”

Alicia said, “Shut up, Jeffrey.”

“Make me.”

She pulled his face to hers and kissed him deeply. Apparently, love was in the air at Rosie’s Bar that night. Jeffrey cupped the back of her head with one hand and let the other go sliding up her leg. He was a good boy. He knew what to do.

Will waited for the roach to relinquish its claim to the Jameson, then poured himself a shot. People from Louisiana liked to call the cockroach the official state bird; they were practically everywhere, and you couldn’t worry too much if you saw one. No matter how clean you kept your place, they were going to get in. But when you got something like this, you were infested. There must be a huge nest somewhere in the wall, or underneath the building. Maybe more than one. He didn’t think an exterminator would fix this problem. The whole wall needed to be torn out. Maybe the whole building would have to be burned down to the dark earth, and then you’d have to keep on burning, all the way down to their mother nests in Hell.

The roaches made little ticking noises as they scrambled about, and he had the brief, uncanny certainty that the noises would cohere into a kind of language if he listened carefully enough.

After a few more minutes, the bugs retired to their bedrooms, and the rows of bottles resumed their stately, lighted beauty. Jeffrey had his hand in Alicia’s shirt.

“That shirt comes off, and it’s free drinks all night,” Will said.

Jeffrey pulled away, his face flushed. Alicia smoothed her shirt and her hair. “You wish, child.”

“I really do.”

Alicia circled her finger over the bar. “Shots. Line ’em up. Maybe you’ll see something before the night is through.”

He doubted it, but he poured them anyway.

Like most twenty-four-hour bars in New Orleans, the place did a decent business even on off nights. Most of the late-night clientele were made up of service industry drones like Alicia and Jeffrey, or cab drivers, or prostitutes, or just the lonely losers of the world, sliding their rent dollar by dollar into the video poker machines.

A few college kids filed in, finding a table some distance from the bar. After a moment one of them broke away and approached Will with an order for the table. Will cast his eye across the bunch— three girls and two guys, including the one placing the order. Almost certainly some of them were underage. College kids usually hit the Quarter for fun, but the Loyola campus was just a few blocks away, so inevitably a few of them drifted into Rosie’s throughout the week, looking for a quiet night.

“Everybody twenty-one?” Will said.

The kid showed him his ID, sighing with the patience of a beleaguered saint. Legal less than a month.

“What about everybody else?”

“Yeah, man. Want me to get them?”

A weak bluff. Will thought about it; it was a Tuesday night, the shift was almost over, and the drawer was light. He decided he didn’t care. “Don’t worry about it.”

Someone put some money into the jukebox and Tom Waits filled the silence. The college kids huddled around the table once they got their drinks, their backs forming a wall against the world. They seemed to be fixated on something between them. They were a lot quieter than he thought they’d be, though, which he considered a blessing. The night continued along its smooth course until Eric and his buddies walked in, staining the mood. They’d obviously already been on the bar circuit that night, coming in with beers in hand, descending on the pool table. Eric lifted his chin to Will in greeting; his three friends didn’t trouble themselves.

“Hey, Eric. You guys need anything?”

“We’re set for now, brother. Thanks.”

Eric was a little plug of muscle and charisma. He was the sweetest guy in the world when sober. When he was drunk, though, every human interaction became a potential flashpoint for violence. He lived in an apartment above the bar, so Will got to see that side of him a lot.

“How’s Carrie?” Alicia asked, drawing him back.

Will shrugged, feeling a surge of unanchored guilt. “She’s fine I guess. Head in the computer all the time, working on that paper she’s doing for school. Same as always.”

“You got yourself a smart one.”

Jeffrey perked up, caught in a wash of inspiration. “Hey, we should all go out sometime. Does she like football? We could go to a Saints game.”

The idea almost made him laugh. “No, man, she does not like football.”

Alicia touched his hand. “That’s totally a good idea though. Let’s just hang out. I haven’t seen her in weeks. We could double date!”

“Oh my God.”

“Don’t be a dick, Will. Make it happen.”

“I’ll suggest it to her. I’m telling you, though, she’s living her schoolwork right now. I’m not even sure she remembers my name.”

“Make it happen.”

A bottle shattered somewhere by the pool table, followed by a muffled grunt. The bar went silent except for the sound of scuffling shoes and short bursts of breath, overlaid with a jaunty dirge from the Violent Femmes. Eric and one of the guys he’d come in with were grappled together, Eric’s arm around the other guy’s neck. He hit him in the face with three quick shots. The guy gripped the jagged neck of his beer bottle and swung it around to rake it across Eric’s arm. Blood splashed to the grungy linoleum.

“Goddamn it!” Will said. “Somebody get that fucking bottle!”

Nobody wanted to get near them. One of the other guys Eric had come in with, some heavily muscled punk with his hat on backward and some kind of Celtic tattoo snaking down his right arm, leaned against the pool table and laughed. “God damn, son,” he said.

Fights happened all the time, and sometimes you just had to let them play themselves out, but the jagged bottle changed everything. Will dialed 911.

Eric wouldn’t let go of the guy’s neck. He hit him again a few more times, and when the bottle came around once more he took it on the cheek. Blood sprayed onto the floor, the pool table, across his own face. Eric made a high-pitched noise that seemed to signal a transition into another state of being, that seemed to carve this moment from the rational world and hold it separate. The escalation of violence shifted the room’s atmosphere. It almost seemed that another presence had crept in: some curious, blood-streaked thing.

Jeffrey flew in from the sidelines, like some berserker canary in a sky full of hawks. He threw himself against them both, wrapping his weak little hands around the wrist of the guy with the broken bottle. The momentum of his charge carried them all into the table where the college kids were sitting, and everybody went down in a clamor of toppling chairs and spilling glasses and shrieks of fear.

Alicia shouted something, running toward the tumble of bodies. Will rounded the bar—too late, he knew, he should have been the one to engage them—and followed her into the scrum. A camera flash leapt from the tangle of bodies, like lightning in the belly of a thunderhead.

By the time he arrived, it was already over. Eric had maneuvered on top of the other guy and was giving him a brutal series of jabs to the side of the head before somebody finally pulled him off. His antagonist, deprived of his weapon, moved groggily, his eyes already swelling shut, his face a bloodied wreck. His right hand looked broken. The kids who’d been at the table formed a penumbra around the scene, looking on with an almost professional calm.

One of the girls said, “Did you call the police?”

“Of course I fucking did.”

She looked at the others and said, “Let’s go.” They dispersed immediately, pouring through the door and sublimating into the night.

Once freed from the entanglement, Eric had grown immediately calm, like a chemical rendered inert. The flesh on his cheek was torn in a gruesome display; the scar would pull his whole face out of alignment. He seemed not to feel it. His eyes were dilated and unfocused, but the rage seemed spent, and he went back to the pool table to retrieve what was left of his beer.

“Eric,” Will said. “You need to get to a hospital. Seriously.”

“Cops are coming?” he said. The words were a slush in his mouth.

“Yes.”

“Fucking pussy.” Will didn’t know if that was meant for him or for the guy on the floor. “All right, come on,” Eric said, and headed out the door. His remaining friends followed, not sparing a glance for their vanquished comrade.

Will, Alicia, and Jeffrey were left with the beaten man, who was only now pulling himself with glacial slowness into the closest upright chair. Will fetched a bar rag and gave it to him for his face, but he just held it limply, his hand suspended at his side. A thin stream of blood drooled from a cut on his face and pooled in a wrinkle on his shirt.

“You all right, man?”

“Just fuck off, dude.”

“Yeah, you can say that to the cops, too, asshole.” It was easy to be tough when the danger had passed. He felt a little ashamed by it, but not enough to shut himself up. “Grabbing a bottle in a fight is chickenshit.”

The guy stood abruptly, knocking his chair over. Will flinched back a step. But the guy didn’t waste any attention on him. He tottered briefly, achieved his bearings, and headed out the front door, into the warm night air. They watched him walk slowly down the sidewalk, into the lightless neighborhood, until he was obscured by parked cars and trees.

“What the hell was that?” Alicia said. Will turned to offer up some wry commentary about Eric and his friends but saw right away that the question was for Jeffrey, not him. “What did you think you were doing?”

“I don’t know,” Jeffrey said. “It was instinct, I guess.”

“You’re not some tough guy. You could have been really hurt.”

“I know. But he had a broken bottle. He could have killed him.”

Will had no stomach for listening to Jeffrey play the humble hero. He had a sudden urge to break a chair over his head. “You did good,” he said.

Only now did he notice how much blood there was, all over his bar, like strange little sigils. On the green felt of the pool table, on the floor beside it, splashed on the chairs and pooled in a little puddle where the guy had been sitting just moments before. Stipples and coins of it making a trail over the floor where Eric had walked. A smear of it on the glass door, left there when he’d pushed his way out. Rosie’s Bar felt curiously hollow, like a socket from which something had been torn loose, or like a voided womb.

Still no sign of the police. On a fucking Tuesday night. What else could they be doing?

The three of them spent the next twenty minutes restoring the tables and chairs to their places, wiping up as much of the blood as they could find. Will found a smartphone kicked into a corner, probably dropped by one of the college kids when their table was knocked into. He slid it into his pocket while he finished cleaning.

When they were done, he returned to his place behind the bar and poured himself a shot of Jameson. He knocked it down and poured three more, arrayed them on the bar, one for each.

They raised their glasses and touched the rims. His hand was shaking.

“To New Orleans!” Alicia said.

“This fucking town.”

They drank.

• • •

Will liked coming home in the small hours. Carrie always left the light over the oven on for him before going to bed, creating a little island of domestic warmth: the clean white range, the fat green teapot, the checkered hand towel hanging from the oven door. Everything else was an ocean of quiet darkness. He set his keys softly on the countertop, retrieved a bottle of Abita Amber from the fridge, and settled down at the kitchen table. He’d given himself a buzz at the bar, and the world seemed pleasantly muddled to him now, not unlike the feeling of being half-asleep on a late morning.

He tried to push the fight out of his mind. The police finally did stroll in, well after Alicia and Jeffrey had gone home and Doug, the graveyard bartender, had taken over. Will had waited for them with growing impatience, nursing a beer in the corner. When they arrived—not Derek, who was a regular here, but a couple guys he didn’t know—they took his statement, gave the place a cursory look, and ambled out again, looking fairly unimpressed by it all. Which was good. Nobody wanted uniformed cops hanging out in the bar. Just having the squad car parked out front—pale white in the dark, the reflective NOPD lettering on the doors flaring into a bright blue warning in the headlights of every passing car—was murder on business. When Will headed home, the bar had been empty, and Doug was leaned back against the counter, reading yesterday’s newspaper.

Will had never seen Eric in a worse fight; he’d taken real damage from that broken bottle. Surely, this would slow him down a bit. At the very least, it might keep him from drinking while he waited for the stitches to heal. The thought brought Will some peace. He’d make a point of dropping in on him the next day, to make sure he’d wised up and gone to the emergency room.

Feeling restless, he wandered through the living room, navigating the darkness by muscle memory, and opened the door into the bedroom. Carrie was asleep, the sheets kicked down around her ankles in the heat. She ended up knocking half the covers to the floor every night, but couldn’t sleep with the air conditioner on because it made her too cold. It was a battle Will had long ago surrendered, having resigned himself to making do with the ceiling fan. She was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of white granny panties which, once, he had found both odd and charming. Her short blond hair was rucked up against the pillow, and her face had the defenseless, wide-open innocence of deep sleep. It was easiest to love her when she was like this. He touched her cheek, hooked a strand of hair back over her ear.

He stood there for a moment, trying to decide if he was tired enough to join her. But the clangor of the evening still rang in his blood. He went back to the kitchen and grabbed another beer from the fridge.

A faint musical chime sounded somewhere, far away—a descending spill of notes in a minor key, like a refrain from a gloomy lullaby. He stopped in mid-stoop, the cold air from the refrigerator washing over him. There was nothing more, so he brought his beer back to the kitchen table and settled into his chair.

The sound came again, and this time he felt a vibration in his pants pocket. It was the cell phone from the bar, the one left behind by someone in that crowd of kids. He slipped it free and examined it: a bright yellow smartphone, fairly new judging by its condition, with a series of sparkling heart stickers affixed to its outer rim. The desktop was a picture of some Far Eastern mountain, snowcapped, radiant with reflected sunlight. He slid his finger across the screen to access the display, and there was a notification of two text messages received.

A momentary hesitation fluttered through his mind before he looked at them. Privacy be damned; she should have been more careful if she didn’t want him to look.

The messages were from somebody named Garrett:

I think something is in here with me.

And then, sent two minutes later: I’m scared.

Will put the phone down and dropped his hands, staring at it. The fog in his head dissipated somewhat, and he was surprised to feel his heart beating. The screen remained lit for a few seconds and then blinked back to its inert state. He sat silently, unsure of what to do next. A sporadic ticking sounded somewhere in the darkness, beyond his little island of light. A scuttling roach. The phone chimed again, vibrating raucously against the tabletop. He leaned over and looked at the message.

It knows I’m here. It’s trying to talk. Please come.

“What the fuck,” Will whispered. He picked up the phone and scrolled through Garrett’s messages. Maybe this was a game. Maybe they went back to the bar, knew he had the phone, and were fucking with him. Before these texts, there were only six messages exchanged between them. Arranging a study session for class, a mention of coffee; simple banalities. Nothing like this.

They were messing with him. He texted a reply: You can pick up the phone tomorrow night at the bar. I go in at six.

Enough time passed that he figured it was all over. He took another pull from his beer and decided it was just about time to join Carrie in bed after all. The roach scuttled somewhere over toward the cabinets, but his normal sense of revulsion was dimmed by his weariness and his irritation at the events of the night. His brain kept cycling around to Jeffrey. Again and again. Launching himself into the fray and maybe tipping the balance in Eric’s favor. The look in Alicia’s eyes afterward: She’d said she was pissed, and she probably was a little, but there was a heat in that look that did not come from anger. It made Will feel small.

The phone clamored again, making him jump. “Goddamn you,” he said to it, and leaned over to see what it had to say.

Tina?

He sighed and texted back, against his own better judgement. No, not Tina, asswipe. I have her phone. He pressed send, immediately felt a swelling of guilt. Why the hostility? Maybe the guy really didn’t know.

Who are you? Get Tina.

She left it at the bar. I’m the bartender. Tell her to pick it up tomorrow night. And stop fucking around.

He shut the ringer off and set it on the dish towel from the stove, to dull its vibrations. It sat there, a cheery yellow rectangle in the dark cave of his kitchen. He finished off the beer, trying to keep his mind unanchored, free-floating; but Jeffrey and Alicia kept bobbing to the surface, thwarting his efforts. He imagined them entangled in bed, a pale twist of limbs and sweat. Something dark turned over inside him, and he felt the sting of shame prickle his skin.

The scuttling sound intensified, and the roach veered into the open. It froze there, as if realizing its error. Its antennae searched the air, trying to gauge the severity of its predicament. Will considered the effort involved in getting up to kill it; it would be long gone before he even got close. He stomped his foot, trying to scare it. The roach did not flinch, brash as a rooster, unmoved by the sudden trembling of the world beneath it.

The phone vibrated quietly on its dish towel. Will didn’t even bother to look at it. He got up from the table, placing the empty beer bottles into the recycling bin with a muted clink, and headed to bed. The roach disappeared under the refrigerator. Everything appeared clean, orderly, and quiet.

• • •

When he awoke, Carrie was already up, and the smell of coffee and frying bacon floated into the bedroom like a summons from God. He lay in the sweet fog of half sleep, relishing the bliss of it. He listened to Carrie’s footsteps as she moved around in the kitchen, listened to her hum something quietly to herself, and felt a well of gratitude for this good life. He imagined Eric waking up in his own grim hovel, his face crusty with blood and bright with pain. Closing his eyes, he stretched in the cool sheets and derived a wicked pleasure from the contrast.

The clink of plates on the countertop finally dragged him out of bed.

She was still wearing only her T-shirt, her long legs gold and lean in the early light. He came up to her from behind, full-mast, and wrapped her in his arms, pressing himself against her and burying his nose in her hair.

“Good morning, pretty girl,” he said.

She paused, smiled, and leaned her head to the side, baring her neck to him, which he dutifully kissed. A splinter of memory lanced through his mind: his shameful jealousy over Alicia. He blew it away like ash.

“Good morning,” she said. She reached behind herself and wrapped her fingers around his cock through his boxers. “I thought you were going to miss breakfast.”

“Madness.”

“The eggs are going to burn.”

He released her with a show of reluctance. She gave him a final squeeze and abandoned him to rescue the eggs from the range. He shambled to the coffeepot and poured himself a mug.

“Whose phone is that?”

He tensed. Her tone was light, but he heard the challenge in it. “Some chick’s,” he said. “She left it at the bar.”

“So you brought it home?”

“I forgot I had it. There was a fight. She dropped it, and I was distracted.”

Carrie scraped eggs onto two plates, lifted bacon still sopping with grease from a frying pan to join them. She sat at the table with him and together they ate in what he imagined was a comfortable silence.

“Was Alicia there with her new boyfriend?” she asked, after a while.

“Yeah. They want to have a double date with us.”

“That sounds awful.”

“I know. Maybe we could rope in a few more people and have a triple date, or even a mass date.”

“Now it sounds like you’re talking about murder.”

“Right?”

Carrie reached across the table and pulled the phone toward her. Will felt an unaccountable twinge of anxiety. “What are you doing?” he said.

“Trying to find out whose phone it is, dummy. Why, should I not look? Am I going to see something I don’t want to see?”

“No. Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not lying about the phone, Carrie.”

“I know. I believe you.”

But an unidentifiable discomfort had been introduced between them, which neither would directly acknowledge and which unfolded invisibly over the table like a sick bloom. Will got up and took his dish to the trash, where he scooped the remains of his breakfast. If Carrie noticed or cared, she gave no sign. Instead she took this as her cue to access the phone and begin her investigations.

Will was pouring himself a second cup of coffee when he heard Carrie yelp.

She put the phone on the table and pushed it away from her. “Fuck,” she said. And then she grabbed it again. “Who the fuck were you talking to last night?”

“What do you mean? What’s going on?”

“You were texting someone on this thing last night.” She delivered it like an accusation. He was about to snap a reply when she turned the face of it to him and he saw the last two texts, delivered after he had abandoned the conversation.

The first:

PLEASE

The second, delivered about ten minutes later, was simply a picture. Will squinted at it, couldn’t make it out. He took the phone from her and held it closer to his face. A cold wave pulsed from his heart. It was a picture of half a dozen bloody teeth. They were arranged in a cluster on what appeared to be a wooden table; the roots were broken on most of them, as if they’d been wrenched out.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“What the fuck is that?”

He considered it for a moment. He swiped his thumb across the screen and brought it back to the main menu. Weather, App Store, Google, Camera, Messages, Maps. All of it banal. Nothing on here, it seemed, to personalize it. He wondered what he would see if he checked the rest of her messages.

“Don’t mess with it, Will. Take it to the cops. Somebody got hurt last night.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they’re just fucking with me.” He knew it was ridiculous even as he said it.

She rose without a word and brought her plate to the sink. She kept her back to him as she ran the water over it.

“You know what? It’s Wednesday; Derek will be in after his shift. I’ll show it to him.”

Derek was a cop in the Sixth District. He and his partner often spent time there on their off nights. He’d saved Will’s bacon on more than one occasion—scaring off drug dealers, helping people out the door who didn’t want to leave, and just generally making it known that Rosie’s was protected. He was a good guy, and Will was happy to have him as a regular. He felt much better about the idea of showing the phone to him than bringing it into the precinct office, where he was pretty sure he’d be laughed out of the building.

Carrie seemed mollified by this. She shut the water off and faced him, leaning against the sink. “What if she comes back to claim it first?”

“I’ll just tell her we haven’t found it. I’ll let the cops deal with it.”

“Even though you just texted somebody that you have it? On this very phone?”

Will shrugged. “What’s she going to do, call the police?”

She thought about that. “Yeah. Okay. I guess that works.”

He put the phone back onto the table and pushed it away from him. “So did you get your paper written last night?”

She sighed, as if already exhausted. “Mostly. I have to go over it again before class. Probably rewrite the ending, since I was a zombie by the time I got to it. Then turn it in and hope Steve likes it.”

Steve: her English Lit professor. It rankled him that she called him by his first name, but she claimed all the students did. He liked an “informal learning environment.” Well, how progressive of him. The fucker. Carrie had been agonizing over a paper on T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” for almost two months, and he was