He turned on the lamp and looked to their crate beds on the floor, but the dogs weren't there, either. The baby's crying quieted to a tired, tapering sigh and then stopped. Or left. He did not think it was coming from the street or a house next door; it had trailed off the other way, toward the rear of the house.
In its place he heard a scratching, the sound of a garden rake pulling on a thick lawn. There were three methodical scratches and then a pause, three or four more and another pause. The sounds were coming to him from the hall.
If it's another doll I'll just stomp the fucker to pieces, he thought, walking out of the master bedroom. One of the dogs whined. He couldn't tell which, but they usually roamed in tandem. The scratching came again, from the spare bedroom adjacent to the master, the one Nadia'd been in the day he toured the house.
Feeling relieved but still on edge, Conrad shuffled down the dark hall, wishing he'd remembered to buy some nightlights at Wal-Mart.
The door was closed. Conrad pictured his dogs in the room, doggishly wondering how the door had closed behind them. Or maybe they were standing at the window, tails erect, the fur on their napes stiff and bristling at something that had startled them from outside.
Conrad opened the door and patted around for the light switch. He could see their outlines. They were hunched over the floor at the center of the room, backs arched, snouts pressed to the carpet, digging as if he were not even there.
Whatever it was, it had been compelling enough for them to nose the futon aside to get to the floor - he could see its bulky frame in shadow off to one side.
His hand found the switch plate and swept up. Golden light shot through the dusty glass bowl full of dead flies and other winged insects. The dogs looked up at him in surprise, their eyes dilated black orbs, then returned in unison to their buried treasure.
Conrad squinted. The carpet and padding had been peeled back like the skin of an animal, exposing floorboards like ribs.
'Luther! Alice, quit that!' And they did, but they didn't look happy about it.
The hole was jagged from their labors - they had cleared a respectable three-foot circle before he had stopped them. The boards were not the same color as the rest of the floorboards in the library and the hall. These planks were an unnatural shade of chocolate, marbled like steaks. The plum color ran against the grain and was deeper in some places, lighter in others. Near the border of the hole he saw a patch of lighter wood, the natural color of pine.
Then he understood. He wasn't looking at painted wood.
He was looking at a stain.
It looked as though someone had spilled a bucket of brown paint and never bothered to clean it up. No, not paint either. Spilled paint dries in thick, opaque blotches. He could just make out the wood grain beneath the blotches.
A delicate breeze passed through the window he'd opened days ago in a stubborn attempt to cool the house without turning on the a/c. The wind brought with it a smell he could not immediately place. It was musky, like blood only stronger - the scent of a woman's menstruation.
His mind leaped to a shameful memory, to a teen Conrad who had on a whim inspected his girlfriend's panties while she, Holly, was in the shower. He had seen them lying next to her dresser, underneath the jeans she had been wearing less than twenty minutes before. Mistaking them for the same pair she'd been wearing when the rumpus began, he had picked them up and felt the stiffness of the fabric. Not really conscious of his need to know, he had pressed his nose to the brown stain in the crotch and sniffed, then cast them aside with a strange mixture of guilt, sympathy and revulsion. It had lasted less than a second, but the smell remained hidden in whatever part of the male brain that records such things, storing it for some potential future biological imperative. This scent filling the air now wasn't Holly's, but it was from the same place. The same essence.
It felt like a warning.
Or evidence.
He knelt between the dogs and stopped his nose six inches from contact. It had not been such a bad smell then, in Holly's bedroom; just another aspect of her he still found fascinating. But here, in such quantity, in his house, marking the floor like a long forgotten murder scene, the scent sparked in his imagination and
(Greer Laski and her mutant children all of them deformed born here in the birthing house)
made him gag.
Conrad reeled to his feet and turned away. He coughed, putting a hand on the door to steady himself. When the worst had passed, he rubbed his tee shirt over his face. He was sweating and it suddenly felt twenty degrees hotter in here, even with the summer breeze.
Wanting nothing more than to be out of the room and away from the stain, maybe as far as the couch downstairs for the rest of the night, Conrad opened his mouth to command the dogs out . . . but no words came. His throat locked up and held his breath hostage, silencing him while the baby cried out, louder than before, much too loud, and his chest suffered an invisible blow that sent shockwaves through his heart and lungs. He was sure the baby's coughing panic was coming from his own mouth - it sounded that close.
The dogs jumped back and began barking savagely up at the ceiling. Conrad's spine tingled from his neck to his tailbone. His stomach somersaulted and he swayed on his feet. While the dogs continued gnashing at the air between the three of them, the room jumped another ten degrees in the span of perhaps three seconds and Conrad broke into a hot, slippery sweat. Red blotches in the corners of his eyes, pinholes of black dancing in the air, darkness closing in.
The baby wailed and he was certain that if he did not leave this room, soon, he would die.
But he could not move. His legs and lower back cramped, hunching him into a ball. The futon in the corner snapped open and began to shake, a vague image of a table overlapping the futon and its frame. In flashes he saw the shadow of a long body, the raven-haired sepia woman who was but wasn't Jo, stripped naked and bathed in sweat as he was. Her body shone in the light, and her mouth was open wide, her scar pinched in a crooked snarl as her head thrashed from side to side. Her teeth chopped at the air as if unseen hands were wrestling her down. Her belly was enormous, a shining white globe rivered with blue veins. Below the navel he glimpsed the glistening pelt of her mound and it was with another kind of shame he felt his arousal quicken. Her hips thrust and bucked but she could not escape the invisible hands that pinned her to the table. She slid around its black leather surface and he tried to scream.
Pulses of light scorched his retinas and his jaw popped, trying to pull air into his burning lungs. He could not see the baby, but it was here, crying like it was being jabbed by cold hands and colder metal instruments. Invisible blades jabbed into his ribs, against his temples and shoulders as Conrad and the baby tried to survive some unknowable assault.
The woman on the table howled in agony, sending a mist of spittle up at her invisible assailants before she was slammed down one final time. Having lost the battle for good, she faced him and that is when he realized she had no face. Above her lips peeled over her teeth there was only a formless white slate of flesh.
The barking ack-ack-ACK ratcheted up into a primal howl and it hurt his ears, bored into his brains. Luther and Alice were full-on fighting now, gnashing at each other's throats in anger and confusion.
'Help! Help!' Conrad choked, losing consciousness as one of the dogs turned on him. There was a dull moment when something punctured Conrad's hand, and his mind's eye saw a freshly sharpened pencil stabbing clean through the soft meat between his thumb and forefinger. Then the wound lit up his brain, sending a signal flare of white-hot pain that cleared his vision in an instant. Conrad jerked his hand but it was stuck in something wet, and for a horrible second he was sure the floor had opened up and bit him. He saw a drop of blood, fat and heavy as paraffin in a lava lamp, floating in the air. Luther shook his head from side to side and only then did Conrad realize his dog had bitten him, was still biting him, clamped down on his hand bones and did not want to let go.