Homebody
by Tamara Sheehan
Maggie woke with a feeling of dread.
Oh hell, she thought, today’s the day they evict the witch.
She got out of bed and pushed her nose to the window. Down there, hard against the curb were two big moving vans and men in overalls carrying furniture out of the building. Leather couches and lamps with coiling cords. Not his. The witch wouldn’t have the money for that sort of stuff. He was too quiet, did too little business.
She got out of bed listening. It was almost nine, so maybe he was gone by now. It had been quiet, if it had been done.
She’d expected a hell of a lot of noise. The witch was insane. His body was a distorted mass of wax, his paper-flesh obscured by tattoos. She’d seen him in the laundry once or twice and stared at the inky ruin of his arms.
He’d stared defiantly back with his glassy, stock green eyes. She’d talked to the new landlord, Morgan, about him and Morgan agreed the witch was nuts. He’d said that violence done to his manufactured body was nothing to the violence done to his place. Sunshine Property Management was going to throw him out.
Not everyone had taken to using witches and the one who lived on Maggie’s floor had never made much money. Maggie had certainly never lost anything she needed to find so bad that she risked contact with them.
Most of them were crazy, inchoate creatures, utterly unhuman, mystified by the world that made them and as glad to shun as be shunned by humanity. After the government cut their funding and announced the second-generation witch to come out in a few months, things got bad. Rumors went around that a witch had once infiltrated a human body and lived for a year as a parasite, undetected. And witches were always making the news.
They were made of flammable materials; skin of paper, bodies of wax, bones of wood. Suicide was easy and spectacular. Magic of appalling ferocity was likely. So Morgan went round warning the people on her floor that things might be noisy the first of November, and did she have insurance? Good. Then not to worry.
But no muffled thumps, no whine of distant smoke detectors made her pulse jump or woke her in the early hours. She bit her lip. She wondered if he’d just expired, stopped working like the government said they would do. She went to the door and listened. Then she opened it.
She left her apartment and went to the rune-carved door at the far end of the hall. The paint had peeled where the eviction notice had been taped. The door stood open.
Maggie pushed through.
“Hello?” She called, softly at first, and then, “Hello?”
She let herself in, closed the door softly behind her and stood breathing the strange, rank air of the place. It was warm, waxy-sweet in here. There were no furnishings, the windows were stripped. The place would have looked unlived-in, but for the wallpaper, which ran through the entire place, floor to ceiling; a deeply ugly, multihued coating that overlaid the standard white. Maggie squinted at it.
It’s not wallpaper at all, she realized with a shock. It’s words.
Carvings, markings in ink or crayon or flaking paint. Runes and words and phrases clustered, some painstaking and beautifully carved, others scrawled in haste across the jumbled surface.
Her eyes traveled up to the ceiling. All around the hall lights there were coiling strands of words, sentences that fell and bled into one another.
Above her the ceiling plaster had been torn away, exposing bare wood, brown like a scab. She blinked hard. For a moment, she’d thought the words around that place were moving.
All the lines of text, the cracks in the ceiling plaster, and line after line of words were melting together to form some sort of shape. The lights became two sightless eyes and the hole in the plaster a gaping, lopsided mouth. Soundless and predatory, made up of runes and decay, a monstrous face loomed above her.
She threw herself back from it. Leering and terrible, the face distorted the ceiling. The mouth enlarged with a shower of plaster. The twisted face seemed to speak the words painted around it: genesthai entheos the lips said, and she fell back from it, sliding, crawling, unable to turn away from the sight because the face was coming down with a loud, fetid exhalation, the wooden mouth agape, the wallpaper and plaster parting, revealing an emptiness that swallowed her.
She never remembered returning to her apartment. Awareness was a series of snapshots. She only recalled turning the dead-bolt on her door, leaning against the cool wood, and sobbing. She remembered rushing to the bathroom to retch. She remembered her hands white on the plastic toilet seat, white and shaking.
It took a long time for her heart to settle and the adrenaline in her limbs to drain away. She rinsed her mouth and splashed some water on her face and looked into the mirror. Her reflection showed a mark like a bruise running across her forehead.
The bruise was long and thin: two lines of pale blue perfectly parallel to one another, like dark typescript under a layer of paper. If she looked hard enough she could make out the suggestion of words just beneath the skin.
She thought of rushing to the clinic down the street, where antiseptic smell wafted from the open doors in the California morning. She thought of calling her friend Jill, to tell her what a helluva morning it had been. But the apartment felt warm and comforting and safe. And she felt brittle as ice.
She padded across the soft carpet, into the living room to draw the drapes against the sun. She closed the windows. She closed her doors.
Nah, I’m not going to bother Jill at work. Or go to that clinic, Maggie thought. I scared myself, that’s all.
She stood by the phone an instant, twirling the hard plastic of a pen between her fingers, then scribbled, with sudden violence on the wall.
I just don’t feel like leaving.
Copyright © 2008 by Tamara Sheehan
