|
The movers left at noon.
Avery watched their truck take a wide turn at the end of the
block and disappear around the corner. He turned to look at
the building that had once been Saint Edward Catholic
Parish. A chain-link fence separated it from the sidewalk. A
check-cashing station flanked it on one side, a liquor store
on the other. The diocese, upon leaving, had ripped out the
sign in front, as well as the statues of Joseph and Mary
that had stood on either side of the front door. Now it was
an almost featureless stone box, squat and grey, like an
enormous cinderblock.
He went inside.
The altar was gone, as well
as the confessional booths and the life-sized crucifix that
had hung from the ceiling. They'd left several rows of pews
behind, but Avery had tipped the movers to lug all but two
of them out to the curb for trash collection. They'd pushed
the remaining pair up against the walls of the nave for
extra seating.
Becca stood in the middle of
the church, scanning the room by turning in slow circles.
When she saw him, she stopped and smiled.
"We did it," she said.
"For better or worse."
"What's that supposed to
mean?"
A ponytail held her
shoulder-length hair out of her face and exposed a dark ring
of sweat around the collar of her grey t-shirt. She hadn't
been able to resist hopping in the truck with the movers and
lugging out boxes and furniture, which meant that Avery had
either had to help out as well, or else look weak next to
his wife. The difference was that although he and Becca were
the same height, she was strong for her size, and he was the
opposite.
There was a ten-foot tall
stained glass window at the head of the apse. The image of
Jesus Christ dressed in white and red robes filled most of
it. He stood with his hands out and his head cocked to the
side. The expression on his face—mouth slightly open, eyes
half-closed—could be interpreted as either of serene
benevolence or utter boredom. A golden halo rose out of his
shoulders. Around him was a garden of daisies, and behind
it, in the distance, a range of brown hills.
"I think I'm going to knock
that out," he said. "Replace it with clear glass."
"Why would you want to do
that?"
"It's creepy. I don't like
the son of God watching me in my own house."
"I can't believe you'd
destroy a piece of art," she said.
"Please. Look at this thing.
We're not talking about the Chartres Cathedral here. It
looks like it came out of a catalog. I think this whole
place might have been furnished by Discount Catholic
Express."
She wrinkled her nose.
"What?" he said.
"This is our home," she
said. "We've lived here for all of four hours and you're
already crapping all over it."
"I'm not. I'm really not.
This is just going to take some getting used to."
He stepped forward and put
his arms around her, feeling the dampness of her skin
through her t-shirt's cotton. She leaned her head forward
into his chest. They stood like that for a moment. Avery
hoped it was reassuring for her, but that wasn't how he
felt.
"It's your room. You can do
whatever you want to it," she said.
"Don't say that. The whole
thing is ours. Both of ours."
At first, Becca had lobbied
for them to live in the church—she'd wanted their bed in the
apse—but had conceded when she realized how drafty it would
be. Instead, they were going to set up the one-bedroom
rectory in back as their living space, with the possibility
of expanding as their family grew. For the time being, the
church would serve double-duty as an oversized storage shed
and as Avery's art studio. He'd been painting in the
borrowed corner of a friend's garage for the past five
years, his schedule subject to whether or not a Toyota Camry
was parked there. His supplies had been the first things
they'd brought over. Easels, plastic bins of paint tubes,
jars of brushes, canvases both fresh and used—it was strange
to see it all spread out when he'd come to associate that
part of his life with being crammed in a tiny space.
The window cast splotches of
color on the floor like a frozen kaleidoscope.
"If you say so," she said.
"But I'm still going to leave this one up to you."
***
Becca did well enough at the
software design firm where she worked that she could have
afforded a house for the both of them on her income alone,
although she'd never mentioned it as a possibility. She
must have sensed that it would devastate him. When he'd
proposed, he'd promised that they would one day buy a home
together. Ten years later, he'd begun to doubt it was a
promise he'd ever be able to fulfill. His career as a
painter was stagnating, and the supplemental income he
brought in by teaching art classes at the Continuing
Education Center was negligible. For their entire married
life they'd lived on top of each other in the same studio
apartment, packing it further past capacity every year.
They were halfway through
their thirties now. She was itching to have kids, and he was
desperate to give her what she wanted. There was simply no
way in that apartment. They'd already begun to look at one-
and two-bedrooms around town when a friend in real
estate—the same friend who'd been lending Avery his garage
for so long—told them about the situation at Saint Edward.
The economic downturn was
affecting the spiritual sector as severely as the
commercial, and like everyone else, the Catholic diocese was
looking for ways to pinch pennies. Saint Edward had been
hemorrhaging parishioners, and, as a result, money, for
decades, and could no longer be sustained. They'd decided to
shut it down, sell it off, and shuffle its dwindling
congregation along to Corpus Christi five miles away. The
frozen housing market, compounded by the odd nature of the
building and the depressed state of its neighborhood, had
resulted in a lack of buyers, and the price had dropped
lower than anyone had predicted.
All of a sudden, Avery found
himself able to afford property. It was small, in
questionable condition, and in a neighborhood that was
neither family-friendly nor safe, but it was property. It
was a home.
Up until the moment that
they'd moved in, he'd been able to convince himself that
that was enough.
***
A windowless corridor
connected the rectory to the church. Avery moved down it on
the sides of his bare feet so as not to wake Becca.
Insomnia had been a part of his life
since his childhood, long enough that he'd come to think of
it more as an unremarkable nuissance, like body odor or
lactose intolerance. When it struck, he just waited it out.
Most nights he slept fine. It tended to only rear its head
during busy, stressful stretches.
Like when he had just bought
his first home.
His only real lament on
nights like this was that though he had to pay the price of
insomnia—fatigue and irritability in the daylight hours—he
was never able to reap the rewards of all the extra time it
offered. For so long, his art studio had been inaccessible
at night, when a car was parked smack-dab in the middle of
it. In their one-room apartment, he couldn't so much as
crack a book or channel-surf without disturbing Becca. He
spent those nights trying to lie as still as possible in a
dark room, measuring the rhythm of his wife's breathing,
trying to ignore the restless energy in his chest.
Tonight he'd realized that
this was no longer the case. He couldn't believe that he
hadn't thought of it before. His studio had walls and doors.
It was entirely his own, and it was just paces away.
He reached the church. He
could make out most of the room, if only in silhouette.
Black columns rose up out of the gloom, with the black
squares of his canvases propped against them. Light pooled
in the elevated apse, pouring down from the stained glass
window above it. Avery's eyes narrowed as he stepped forward
into the room. The window looked different than he
remembered it, in a way that his brain wasn't moving quite
fast enough to process. Was he imagining things? Remembering
it wrong? Were his eyes lying to him as they struggled to
adjust to the dark? When he reached the center of the room,
a geyser of unease let loose in his stomach.
There was no mistake.
The image had changed.
There was still a garden, but it was
wild and overgrown with vines. The flowers, which he had
earlier taken for daisies—no, which had been
daises—were now dark, large, and thorny. The hills in the
background had become an expanse of crags and boulders,
crooked and uneven like a mouth of shattered teeth. Boulders
collapsed on top of one another formed impenetrable caves.
The man in the center of the
window—
"Jesus Christ."
It was not.
The pose was the same, but
the attire different. Instead of robes, he wore a cloak with
a hood pulled low to conceal most of his face. He had a
beard, curly and wild, that reached halfway down his chest.
It was a bum's beard, or an Appalachian mountain man's.
A lunatic's, Avery
thought.
The man's eyes were hidden,
but Avery could somehow sense them glaring down at the
church below. Like Jesus, he held his arms out, but there
was nothing inviting about the gesture. It was predatory.
David thought of a wolf squaring off against a rival,
hackles raised, moments away from settling a pack dispute.
A hot ache crept up in
Avery's chest. He'd stopped breathing. He sucked down some
air, and then winced at the sound cutting through the
stillness.
***
He sat at the kitchen table.
His face felt heavy. A cup of coffee cooled in front of him.
Meanwhile, Becca moved from room to room at a clip, from the
kitchen counter to feed an English muffin into the toaster,
to the bedroom to put on her watch and earrings, to the
living room to grab her keys, back to the bedroom where
she'd left her cell phone charging overnight. The
inefficiency of the trajectory betrayed how much time they'd
spent in a studio apartment where she could complete her
entire morning ritual without taking more than a few steps.
She called something to him
from the next room. He couldn't make it out and didn't
answer. The toaster ejected her muffin. In an instant, she
was back, finding a tub of butter in the refrigerator.
"I asked how the painting
went last night," she said. "That's what you were doing in
there, right?"
She'd found him that
morning, sleeping upright in one of the church pews. He
didn't remember nodding off, or even sitting down. He had
yet to tell her what he'd seen, and he wasn't sure why.
"Yeah. It was fine. It was
strange."
"Strange?" She scraped a
butter knife along the muffin. "I'd have thought it'd be
great. That place must be so inspiring. It's got to be
better than the garage at least, right?"
"I don't know. I liked the
garage."
"More than the church?"
"The church…makes me
uncomfortable."
That had been true even
before he'd seen the man in the window.
"Uncomfortable. Okay. Well,
should we change things up? We could move the sofa and the
TV into the church and call it the living room. And then the
living room could be your studio."
He didn't answer.
"What we're doing," she
said. "All the choices we've made, they've been so you can
paint. I'm okay with the fact that I work full-time and you
don't, and I'm okay that we were cooped up in that apartment
for the years. But I'm okay with it because it means you get
to paint. Your maps, or whatever. We do this so you can do
what you want."
His maps—the default
word when she was feeling skeptical or frustrated by her
husband's art.
He said, "I don't want our
life to be about you appeasing me. Maybe I should give up
the painting thing. I could work full time. We could get
another place. A real house."
Shock flickered across her
face, and then a darkening of anger. She shut her eyes. "I
can't deal with this right now. I have to go to work."
***
He had a class to teach in
the evening, but the day belonged to him. It was supposed to
be spent painting—that, as Becca had said, was why they
lived the life that they did—but he was loathe to go back
into that church. For a long time, he didn't leave the
kitchen. He stayed at the table and drank cup after cup of
coffee.
When he finally worked up
the nerve, the window was as it had been when Becca had
woken him up. Rowed daisies had replaced the overgrown
garden. The crags had reshaped themselves into rolling
hills. The hooded man with the wild beard was gone, and the
son of the Christian God stood in his place, arms out,
half-smile on his lips. Not for a second did Avery think
that he was the victim of some trick of the light. He'd seen
it. He'd stared at it for hours. The window had either
changed by some supernatural force, or he was crazy. Both
options left him feeling helpless, insignificant.
It took longer than usual
for his painting muscles to warm up that day. His hands were
shaking. The small canvas felt cramped and restrictive. He
was afraid to go near it, afraid that the mere act of
touching a wet brush to its surface could destroy the whole
thing.
For the past few years, he'd
been working on a series of bird's eye paintings of dense
city blocks. The buildings were improbably-shaped Googie
skyscrapers with spiked turrets, rooftop gardens and glass
elevators. Angles were as sharp as box cutters. Streets,
causeways, overpasses, and people-movers snaked and spiraled
between them, crammed with tiny cars and pedestrians in
business suits. Each painting was on a ten-inch by ten-inch
canvas, and all were painted with the intent that they could
be laid out side by side and top to bottom in any order and
still connect logically.
He didn't know what the end
goal of the project was. He didn't know how many of these he
intended to do, or even how many he'd done so far. He hoped
it would all make sense eventually.
It took hours, but
eventually the anxiety within him settled. He stopped
thinking about his shaking hands, and as a result, his hands
stopped shaking. His awareness of the passage of time faded,
so time passed faster. Before long, it was time to break for
lunch. His stomach still stung from the morning's excessive
coffee intake, so he took a walk around the block instead of
eating. Then he went back into the church and painted until
sunset.
Sometime around
then—sometime when his attention was fixed on the canvas and
his back to the window—it changed again. It happened without
fanfare, without a sound. Whether the transformation was
instantaneous or gradual, he had no idea. He happened to
look up at one point, perhaps because of a marginal
awareness of the fading light, and saw it. Saw him.
The hate, the sheer malevolence that he could sense in the
cloaked figure was as palpable as the heat from an open
oven. It wasn't directed at him, not specifically, but at
the whole church, at the whole world. It was staggering.
It had to do with the
separation of night and day. Avery now understood that much.
When the sun shined, this church belonged to Jesus, to his
followers, to their faith. By moonlight, it belonged to that
other one. They shared the office, but worked opposite
shifts. Avery suspected that they might differ in other
regards as well.
Which means what,
exactly? he wondered. Am I talking about the devil?
He turned the word over in
his mind, testing its weight and feel, before deciding that
he was not. The window's nocturnal occupant was something
else, something foreign. If he had a name, Avery doubted
he'd ever heard it.
If this was, by day, a
Christian church, was it by night a church of the hooded
man? Did he have beliefs and tenets, prayers and hymns? Did
he have a congregation? An image flashed inside Avery's head
of worshippers in Sunday suits and dresses ambling up the
cracked and litter-strewn sidewalk towards Saint Edward,
filing inside for their nighttime service, their faces pale
and corpselike in the moonlight, Night of the Living Dead
set to a church organ.
When he heard the rattle of
Becca's car in the driveway, he pushed the thought away.
***
They spent the next week
unpacking boxes, moving furniture, and cleaning out the many
corners and closets that the Saint Edward people had left
layered in dust when they'd gone. They found stacks of
hymnals and boxes of church newsletters going back a decade.
Someone had forgotten a green and gold cassock in the back
of a cupboard. Rosaries packed one kitchen drawer, wrapped
and coiled around one another like snakes. They left phone
messages with the church's realtor letting her know what had
been left behind, but never heard back. Eventually, they
brought it all out to the curb.
Every night, from the end of
dinner until exhaustion caught up with him, he turned on all
the lights in the church and painted. He'd always been a
slow, meticulous worker, spending a month or more on even
the smallest of canvases. Working at night, fed by the
energy of his insomnia, he cranked through a medium-sized
painting in a single week, slashing at it with broad
strokes, letting the paint clump and run as it wanted.
Someone had raised this particular block of his
ever-expanding city up from the bottom of the ocean. The
buildings were grey and brown. They bled into each other. He
couldn't bring himself to paint people into its swampy
streets, but he couldn't bring himself to throw it away,
either.
The hooded man looking down
at him like an abusive stepfather didn't help things.
He knew that as long as he
was working, Becca wouldn't come into the church, and that
as long as he worked nights, she wouldn't have to find out
about the window. This was no longer about being reluctant
to tell her. He was now actively concealing it. She couldn't
know that this place, the very best that he could do for
her, was—what? haunted? cursed? possessed?—wrong,
more wrong than either of them could have guessed. Or worse,
he couldn't let her know that the fasteners in his mind were
coming loose, that he was seeing things, that he was
terrified of an inanimate object.
He was terrified. He
faced away from the window and willed himself to ignore it
while he worked, but he could feel it at his back all the
time. No matter how often he told himself that despite its
weirdness, there was no reason to think the hooded man could
hurt him, he never quite believed it. There was too much
pent-up violence in his posture, too much bloodlust in his
unseen eyes.
***
He went into the bedroom at
three in the morning. Becca was sitting upright in bed with
the lights off, her back up against the headboard and her
knees drawn up to her chest. Her eyes shined. She watched
him undress.
"Was I making too much
noise?" he said.
"No. Not at all."
He pulled back the covers
and climbed in. "Can't you sleep?"
She lied down and slid a
hand onto his chest. The pressure was soothing. "Things are
going well for us, right?"
"Are they?"
She flinched.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I
didn't mean that."
"We have a home. We have
each other. Why can't you be happy?"
"This isn't the life I
wanted to give you."
She lifted herself up onto
her elbows and furrowed her brow. "What do you mean?"
"This place. It's weird.
It's depressing. You deserve better."
"I don't think it's weird. I
think it's interesting."
"That's just a polite way of
saying the same thing," he said.
"It isn't."
"I thought I could do the
art thing and give you the life you deserve," he said. "A
real house. A place for a family. Instead, we're here. I'm
afraid we're stuck. I'm afraid it's too late."
"It's not about giving me
anything. It's about the life we chose together."
"We didn't choose. I did. I'm the one
who decided to go to art school. I'm the one who's never had
a real job. Maybe I chose wrong."
"There is no wrong."
Her voice teetered between a sob and a shout. "There's just
choosing to be unsatisfied and choosing to be happy."
"It's not a choice," he
said.
"It is. You have to choose
to be happy. If you can't make that choice, you never will
be. It doesn't matter where we live, or what we do. I can't
spend my life trying to make you feel better."
***
In the morning, he waited
for Becca to leave for work. Then, still in his bathrobe, he
went out to the sidewalk. The air was damp and thick. A
small crowd of loiterers was assembled in front of the
liquor store next door. They stood at the center of a cloud
of cigarette smoke, talking and drinking from bottles tucked
into brown paper bags. When they caught sight of Avery, they
lowered their voices and watched him. He walked up and down
the curb, head down, examining the contents of the gutter
beside it—junk food wrappers, cigarette butts, a cracked
brick.
He picked up the larger
half.
The picture in the window
was reversed from this side. With only the dim interior of
the nave to backlight it, it was dull, like the eyes of the
recently deceased.
He cocked back the brick
chunk like a shot put and let it fly. It punched a hole
through Jesus' gut, and landed inside. For a few seconds,
that was all. Avery started to reach for the other half.
Then the entire window gave way.
When Becca got home, she
found him sweeping up shards of colorful glass with a push
broom. She said, "So I guess we're replacing that window
after all."
***
They ate dinner at the
kitchen table. Afterwards, Avery cleared the dishes and
loaded the washer. Tonight he'd sleep deeply and easily. The
light and air flowing through the empty church window had
energized him in a way that he hadn't experienced in a long
time, and he'd spent the entire day painting. He didn't have
class, so they opened a bottle of wine and watched movies in
the living room. At eleven, Becca announced that she was
going to bed. While she washed up and brushed her teeth, he
changed into his pajamas and went into the church.
The lights were off, but
he'd spent enough time there that he could navigate without
them. He walked to the center of the room, where his newest
painting was propped on an easel. He picked up his mason jar
of brushes soaking in murky water and was about to bring it
to the kitchen sink to be washed when he glanced up at the
empty space that had once held a stained glass window.
The jar slipped from his
hand and exploded on the ground. Cold water washed over his
bare feet.
It wasn't empty at all.
The window had returned.
Sharp crags, deep caves,
alien flowers. The man was nowhere to be seen. It was as
though there had never been anyone there at all, or perhaps
it was more like he'd gone off on his own, leaving his
strange garden behind. Perhaps it was exactly like that.
A voice not quite his own
sounded in Avery's head: You let him out.
He couldn't say how, but all
of a sudden he knew this with a perfect clarity. By day, the
window might have held a representation of Christ—at least
until Avery had knocked it out—but by night it held the man
himself, stuck inside the glass, pressed in place like a
drop of blood on a microscope slide. Smashing the daytime
glass had no effect on the nighttime window, other than to
provide a hole through which the hooded man could escape.
Meaning he was out. Meaning
he was here.
Something moved behind
Avery. The noise was slight, a foot shifting on the carpet.
Sound was strange in the church. When there was silence, it
pressed against the walls like air inside a tire. When there
was sound, even a sound as quiet as this, it echoed. Avery
spun around and stared wide-eyed into darkness. He could
only make out shapes. After a moment, one shadow detached
itself from another. He was here, in three-dimensional flesh
and blood, in Avery's home, and he was coming towards him.
The impossibility of it all
was an inconsequential detail. That it couldn't be happening
seemed trivial, a minor inconvenience to be brushed aside.
What mattered was the situation itself, that the man
standing in Avery's painting studio had, only twenty-four
hours ago, been standing in a stained glass window because
someone—priest? wizard? someone to whom the impossibility of
the situation mattered even less than it did to Avery—had
chosen to imprison him there.
And who goes to prison?
Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. Given the unique circumstances,
Avery suspected that this one might be something worse.
He willed himself to run,
and for a moment, found himself unable to do so. His legs
refused to comply. The man took another step towards him.
Pieces came into focus—the tangles of his beard, the
stitching of his robe, the hard, deep lines in his face. The
hood's shadow still obscured his eyes, and for that, Avery
was grateful.
You're losing your mind,
he thought.
"No. I'm not."
That was enough. His legs
were suddenly his again. He took a step backwards, one that
threatened his balance. Then he turned and ran.
Hurtling through the
darkness, he did better than he would have thought. He made
it out of the church and down the corridor to his living
room before a ceramic lamp and the end table supporting it
rushed out at him. All three toppled with a crash. When he
tried to push himself to his feet, he pressed his palm onto
a broken shard, puncturing the flesh. He cried out, dropped
to his elbows, and clutched his hand.
Becca called from the next
room. "Are you okay? What was that?"
He cast a glance over his
shoulder. He couldn't see anything in the darkness, and
couldn't hear anything over his own kick-drum heartbeat, but
he didn't doubt that the man was approaching. Avery rose and
started to run again. Pain erupted in his knee. He must have
banged it on the table. He didn't let it slow him.
Becca stood in the bedroom
doorway, framed by a rectangle of light. She had already
changed into the t-shirt and exercise pants that she slept
in. She was frowning into the hallway. When she caught sight
of Avery barreling towards her, her mouth dropped open.
"Avery, what—"
"Get inside!"
She stepped backwards to
give him access. He slammed the door shut and collapsed onto
it.
"What's going on?" she said.
"There's someone here.
There's someone in the house."
That someone slammed into
the other side of the door. It kicked open a few inches,
enough to throw Avery forward. Becca screamed. In an
instant, Avery was back at the door. This time, he pressed
his shoulder against it and braced himself for the next
impact. It came a moment later, a heavy thud that rattled
his spine.
"Jesus Christ," Becca cried.
"Who is that?"
"Call the police! Do it
now!"
She fumbled for her cell
phone, plugged into its charger on the nightstand. The
hooded man threw himself against the doorway again. The
whole thing bucked. Deep inside the wood, Avery heard a
crack and felt a slight change in the door's shape. Becca
was yelling into her phone.
"Get out of here!" he
shouted. "This is our home! Get the hell out!"
He crouched low and dug in.
Wedged like a door jam, he could feel the wood's rigidity
and fragility. He could feel the walls and the floor, and
the foundation that connected them. Smeared red handprints
from his gashed palm decorated the door, and a puddle was
forming at his feet. He leaned with every bit of his weight
and strength, with his every thought, willing it not to give
way, and held the world together. |
