Part 1/2
I’ve met my wife either once or twice, depending on how you count it.
The first time, I almost missed her.
I must have walked past her without noticing, because it wasn’t until I glanced behind me that I saw the woman shuffling down the sidewalk, holding too many boxes.
“Can I give you a hand with that?” I asked.
She was already looking at me. “Oh, thanks. I’m going pretty far, though, and I wouldn’t want to put you out. But if you’re sure…”
I squatted down to grab the bottom box, then hoisted the rest of the pile with it.
“At least let me take one of them,” she said with a chastening look. “It’s going to be pretty embarrassing if you have to stop later and ask me to help.”
It was a compelling argument. I let her pull a box off the pile.
“I’m Lucas,” I said.
“Elise.”
* * *
She hadn’t been kidding about the length of the walk. It was almost an hour before we stopped.
Our destination turned out to be an intercity bus stop, the kind where the city had given up on trying to install bus shelter glass faster than the resident miscreants could destroy it. The sun had set at some point on the walk, and the shelter was lit by a lone street light, the tall sturdy type you usually see lining freeways. It cast a flickering cone, illuminating the bus station’s few visitors, who each seemed to be lurking right at the cone’s edge.
“So what’s in the boxes?” I asked.
She smiled wistfully. “Memories.”
I raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to say more. She caught my eye and grinned cheekily, but said nothing.
I shrugged. “Keep your secrets, then.”
“Oh, trust me,” she said, “I don’t need your permission for that.”
* * *
A bus pulled into the station, sooner than I thought it might. I was almost disappointed. No, I shouldn’t lie; I was disappointed.
“Walk me over?” she said, getting up. I nodded and followed.
I didn’t notice that she forgot to take her boxes. I didn’t notice that the boxes had been gone since the moment we sat down.
Elise stepped onto the bus without a word, and I stood at the door. I’d been expecting a goodbye, and was now unsure of what to do with myself, seeing as none had been offered. I watched as she pulled out a bus card and scanned it on the farebox, then watched as she pulled out another card and scanned that one too.
“You’re paid for,” she said. “You coming?”
It seemed the only thing to do, so I stepped aboard.
* * *
It was at least two hours into the ride before I realized I had no idea where we were going.
I had just finished teaching Elise how to play chess, and she was now taking the opportunity to show me that she had only been pretending to be a beginner. We huddled over the chess app on my phone, her head resting on my shoulder. She smelled like juniper berries.
“Darn,” she said, as we reached a stalemate. “I was really hoping to embarrass you.”
My retort was cut off as the bus came to a screeching halt, nearly throwing me into the seat in front of me. I glanced out the window: we’d stopped just off the main highway, on a road beside a gas station.
“We’ll be stopped for a while,” Elise said. “There’s time to go to the store, if you want.”
I got up. “Don’t let them leave without me.”
* * *
The woman behind the counter studied me for a moment as I entered, then gave me a look that seemed almost sympathetic.
I grabbed two cups and poured myself a coffee. I held the other cup for a moment, realizing I had no idea what Elise would want.
“New friend?” asked the woman behind the counter.
I gave a sheepish grin. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Whatever you’re getting them, add honey,” she said. She turned back to her crossword, apparently content to leave it at that.
I poured the drink and paid at the counter.
“Poor bastard,” she muttered as I left.
* * *
I reboarded the bus, two just-a-bit-too-hot beverages in hand. “Lemon ginger tea with honey,” I said, handing it to Elise.
Her eyes lit up. “How’d you know?”
I shrugged. The moment my butt touched the seat, the bus started up again.
I told her stories from times when I still had friends, and she told me her favorite flower (forget-me-nots), the time of day she liked best (just before sunset), the way her childhood room smelled (like old fabric), and exactly fifty-eight other little things about herself, all of which I still remember to this day.
* * *
“Look,” Elise said. “Let me show you something wonderful.”
She placed her palms to the window, forming a circle with her index fingers and thumbs.
And in the glass, between her hands, the stars danced.
* * *
Elise pulled her lips from mine as the bus reached its final stop. “This is us,” she said.
As we stepped out into the night, there was a slight crispness to the smell in the air, like fog, but it wasn’t foggy. The stars were out in such force that I couldn’t help but turn my head to the sky and take it in. How strange it was, and how easy to forget while living in the city, that something so ordinary could be so awe-inspiring.
There was a certain unfamiliarity about the stars that night. It made the magnificence more, somehow; the quiet terror of the infinite vastness blended with the quiet terror of the unknown, the other. I heard it, too, or my mind filled in what should have been playing: a deep, quiet hum, with a murmur beneath of something that sounded like a voice. Beautiful and terrifying, all at once.
I might have stood there forever, just watching, except that at some point I became conscious that Elise was looking at me. Her gaze was tender, perhaps not dissimilar to my gaze into the cosmos.
“Can I have your name?” she said.
I was sure I’d told her already. “Lucas.”
She shook her head. “I meant your last name.” She looked down for a moment, perhaps trying to conceal her flushed cheeks.
“It’s -”
“Can I have it?” she asked again, meaningfully.
I don’t know if it was my loneliness and naivete, or just the heat of the moment, but looking in her eyes I desired nothing more than to give her what she wanted.
“You’d need to marry me first,” I said.
“That’s the idea.”
She put a hand on my chest, and her eyes stayed with mine.
“Marry me,” I said.
“Ask me three times,” she replied. I did.
We passed a few moments in silence then, just looking at each other. I was the one to break it.
* * *
At some point after that I found myself in a motel room. It was too late to get back on the bus, so I must have arranged to sleep at the motel and catch a ride back in the morning. That made sense, but I could not for the life of me remember how I’d ended up in that room.
Sitting there, I should have felt regret for the events of that day: eloping with some strange woman, asking her to marry me. But somehow, even then, with a moment to slow down and process my thoughts, I still felt the same. I wanted to marry her.
For now, though, I tucked myself into bed. As I drifted off, I noted that there was a chair braced against the closet doors, pinning them shut. I must have put the chair there myself, but I couldn’t remember why.
* * *
I met a chauffeur outside the hotel. He drove a strange old car with a spare tire on the back that didn’t match the others and a stick shift that I never saw him touch. He spent more time looking towards me than towards the road, yet I never saw his face.
We fetched a quick breakfast and picked up my suit from the tailor. I didn’t see Elise, of course. That would have been bad luck, on our wedding day.
* * *
Of our wedding, I can only recall three images, frozen in time and forever burned into my mind:
A pair of grand ash doors, carved with a celtic knot.
Elise’s face, my hands just about to part the veil in front of it.
And the crowd, each individual face out of place among the others, and yet together indistinguishable. Everything was wrong about them but I could only force myself to focus on the eyes. I did not know that eyes could be upside-down.
And there is one more image, too, an image which I know is there but that my mind refuses to send for. My bride with her veil parted.
* * *
I woke up to the familiar feeling of the morning light creeping through the gap in my curtains and alighting on my face. It’s a strange feeling, waking up somewhere entirely familiar then slowly realizing that it isn’t where you should have been. I shot out of bed and into my living room, a sick feeling in my stomach. There were no signs that Elise, nor anyone at all, had been there.
I checked my phone - no messages - and my eyes flicked to the time - 9am, not unusual - then the date, the 7th. I read it twice more, then opened my calendar to confirm. That can’t be right, I thought. I’d met Elise on the 6th.
How much of it had been real? If none of it was, why couldn’t I remember how I got home from work?
* * *
I went back to the street where we met.
There was nothing there, of course - what could there have been? Graffiti on a bus bench saying “Elise was here?” The street was the same as it ever had been, save for the one time when there might have had a strange woman with a stack of boxes.
On my way home, I passed a florist. I’d passed this florist many times before,, and never thought anything of it, but today a bouquet of white roses and forget-me-nots caught my eye.
In case it needed to be said, I never saw Elise again.
* * *
Some part of me still couldn’t forget Elise, despite it all. I paid notice to the extra divot in my mattress, even though I’d clearly made it myself, rolling around in the night. And I noticed that when the apartment didn’t smell like flowers (I was now a regular patron of that florist), it smelled like juniper.
My manager canceled our weekly meeting. A conflict, he said. He never scheduled another one. None of my tasks meant anything anymore.
At some point I realized that I’d stopped calling my parents and that they’d stopped calling me. It figured, of course: my parents had always been there for me even in the times when I’d pushed everyone else away, but now it seemed that even they couldn’t be bothered with me. I didn’t blame them; they had been saints for sticking with me longer than everyone else, but they were bound to give up eventually.
Time started getting away from me. I would make dinner on a Saturday and then it would be Wednesday. I never remembered anything between deciding to go to bed and waking up, not even dreams. It was like watching an old scratched-up DVD, constantly skipping.
I stopped going to the office, and after a few weeks stopped working entirely. My manager never reached out to check on me, and new work stopped appearing in my inbox. Nonetheless, the paychecks kept arriving.
It was the same story everywhere else. Passersby gave me a three-foot berth on the sidewalk, seemingly without realizing I was there. When checking out at the grocery store, I had to shout directly in the clerk’s face three or four times just to get them to see that I was standing in their lane with a conveyor belt full of groceries. Even automatic doors stopped opening for me.
The worst part was how natural it all felt. It was like I had stopped existing long ago, and the world had finally decided to stop pretending I merited its attention. Every day I woke up terrified that this would be the day that my phone would stop responding to my touch, or that my leasing office would move a new tenant into my apartment.
I was lonely, certainly, lonelier than I ever had been, but it wasn’t a sad loneliness, somehow. It might have been bitter - certainly it was bitter - but not sad. Mostly, it felt like I was missing a piece of myself. I was losing time - hours, sometimes days or weeks - and those lost hours were precious to me in a way I couldn’t fully comprehend but could fully feel.
It wasn’t all bad. There was a peculiar happiness beneath all the gloom, not quite like any I’d felt before. Simple things, like finding an interesting jar of artisanal honey or learning to play a new song, excited me in a way they never had before. It was almost enough to forget the loneliness.
I wish it had just been loneliness.
* * *
Something started paying visits to my apartment. I would be sitting somewhere, the kitchen or living room maybe, and hear the metallic creak of the door handle rotating into the open position, then slowly retreating back. I bought a baseball bat and started locking both deadbolts.
* * *
Most people avoided me on the street, unable to even look at me, but I grew to prefer those people. They were better than the ones who watched.
* * *
The same person kept getting into the elevator with me. I could never get a proper count of her arms.
* * *
One evening, while waiting for water to boil on the stove, I decided to take the garbage out.
I flicked the deadbolt open and grabbed the knob.
“Stop.” The word came from behind me.
As I looked down at the door, I thought about the doorknob turning on its own. What were the chances the visitor was on the other side?
I leaned down and peered through the peephole. I saw the visitor.
Human skin on a bovine skull, with lashed eyes, human pupils, and a lipped smile that exposed its teeth all the way to the back of its head.
As the knob began to turn, I realized I hadn’t reset the deadbolt.
* * *
It took its time opening the door. The horrible horse-head inched its way through the opening slowly, one dead eye boring into my skull. It laughed.
It stepped into the entryway, closing the door gently behind itself. I stood stock-still in front of it, not daring to breathe. It stepped around me. I reached for the door. It met my gaze. I edged the door open.
It was eyeing me - challenging me, even - but still facing into the apartment. My eyes flicked again to the open hallway. The creature smiled. The message was clear, somehow: if I ran, it wouldn’t chase.
I can’t let it get to the bedroom.
Resolve burned in my chest, its source unknown. I stepped towards the monster. It laughed.
We both sprung at once, me towards the kitchen and the monster towards me. A limb whipped out, striking me square in the stomach and throwing me against the fridge. It was bone, wrapped loosely with paper-thin skin. It felt like getting hit with a tire iron.
I stumbled to my feet, then grabbed the pot from the stove with both hands and heaved.
The beast recoiled, the scalding water striking it in the face, and I went for my bat, tearing the burned skin on my hands as I gripped it.
The monster considered me for a moment, then slunk back into the hallway, snickering to itself all the while.
* * *
I threw up blood for the next few weeks after that. I tried to persuade a hospital to treat me, but gave up as I couldn’t say more than two words to a doctor before they forgot I was there.
I bought a shotgun. Getting a gun in my state is pretty easy, and even easier when you can grab one off the rack and walk out without the clerk paying you any mind.
I filled a dozen shotgun shells with pig-iron buckshot that I forged myself. Touching the iron made the skin on my hands crack and wilt, so I hoped it would be enough to kill a demon.
The visitor tried my door again the following week. It cost me four shells, and a month trapped in bed, inches from death’s door. I was barely conscious, yet my bandages were always fresh.
As far as I know, the hallway is still painted with monster viscera to this day.
* * *
I first realized that something was strange about Morgan after my second week of dropping her at school. I realized that I didn’t recall ever having a daughter.
It was the oddest thing. I didn’t remember her at all, and yet I knew her perfectly. I knew that her birthday was January 15th, her first words had been “mama,” then “bye,” then “dada,” she had started walking late but started reading early, she loved drawing tigers. But I didn’t remember how I knew any of that.
The timing was inexplicable, too. Morgan was four years old. Even if Elise was more than a figment of my imagination, I’d met her only a year ago at that point, and there hadn’t been anyone else before then. But I was certain Morgan was my daughter. She looked just like my mother and sister had at that age, and she had my bright blue eyes.
But none of that really mattered. I knew, even before I realized she existed, that she was the most important thing in my life. The only thing in my life. I would never not be happy so long as I had her. All of my fretting about loneliness and invisibility felt silly, now, compared to this.
The invisibility still presented a challenge, though. While I might have been able to rob most stores blind without anyone so much as raising a finger, picking up Morgan from school was consistently a herculean task. The teacher never remembered me, of course, but she didn’t turn the same blind eye to Morgan. In the best case, it took at least half an hour of talking in circles and examining identification documents for me to convince her that I was Morgan’s father. In the worst case, the situation escalated into an amber alert.
More importantly, the whole situation was tough on Morgan, too. She didn’t fully understand what was going on, of course, but she was upset with her teacher for being difficult and upset with me for not just taking her home.
I figured the difficulties were worth it if it meant Morgan could have some semblance of a normal childhood. I was worried about what would happen if I homeschooled her - worried the isolation would make her fade, like I did.
* * *
“There was an animal at school today, Daddy.”
I glanced back at Morgan through the rearview mirror. She was strapped into her booster seat, fidgeting with a juice box.
“An animal?” I said. “What kind of animal?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. Her straw was hanging out of her mouth, making her look like a funny little walrus. “It was like a dinosaur.”
I scratched my chin. “Hmmmm… Was it an iguana?”
She shook her head. “It was big. And nobody else could see it.”
* * *
From that day onwards, when Morgan was at school, so was I.
Her classroom had windows that faced the hallway, so I stood in the hall, keeping a constant eye on her. I kept my shotgun concealed under my jacket. I wasn’t thrilled by the possibility of someone noticing me loitering in an elementary school with a weapon, but I was willing to risk it to protect my daughter. And it wasn’t like I had much else to do with my time.
It took two weeks for the thing to show itself.
* * *
I had to blink when I saw it, trying to figure out if perspective was playing tricks on me. It was far too long.
As it skittered towards me, it curled up the wall and onto the ceiling. I drew my shotgun and racked it twice, ejecting a shell. The beast pulled away, smelling its death in the discarded round. I could tell because I smelled it too; it burned so badly I thought my nose might bleed.
* * *
Over the next few weeks, I sometimes saw the creature poke its head into the hallway, then retreat when it saw me.
Morgan’s class was learning about farms. She liked cows best.
* * *
It was two months before something changed.
This time, the beast didn’t stop when it saw me. Its entire length twisted around the corner and into the hallway, as it had on that first day. The shotgun shook in my hand; it seemed the thing was no longer afraid of my iron shells, and the implications terrified me.
It was walking slowly. Too slowly. There was something confident and deliberate about it. Why had it changed tactics? Why wasn’t it afraid? My eyes flicked over to Morgan - she was safe in the classroom - then to the other side of the hallway, just to make sure nothing was sneaking up behind me.
Its feelers prodded at the air, but its eyes were trained on me. It was thirty feet away now, one body length. I racked my shotgun, but hesitated on the trigger for a moment longer. I knew that when I fired, all hell would break loose.
Just as I resolved to fire if it took another step, it stopped.
A growl began to emit from it, then the growl became a scream. It echoed through the hallway, so much so that it seemed like it was coming from all directions at once, and for a few moments there was a second scream layered on top of it. My eyes flicked again to my daughter, and I took a step to block the classroom entrance. I breathed out and braced the shotgun.
The scream turned into a hiss, and the creature bolted.
I stood there for a moment as it slipped out of view, then took a breath and steadied my shaking hands. I glanced at Morgan again; she was still just reading a book like nothing was wrong. It seemed she hadn’t heard it.
I chastised myself for letting it get this far. I should have pulled her out of school as soon as she’d first spotted the monster. Really, I shouldn’t have enrolled her in the first place. I opened the classroom door, resolving to take her home.
I stopped.
The outside window was open, and she was gone.
* * *
There was no sign of her around the school. I drove frantically around the neighborhood, looking for any sign of her, anything out of the ordinary, anything. I drove three days without sleeping.
When I could drive no more, I went home. As I walked up the steps to my building, I was stopped by the view through the window.
Where my apartment lobby should have been, I was instead looking into a finely furnished sitting room. Standing in the center was a man I almost recognized, a man whose eyes were upside-down. His hand was on my daughter’s shoulder. The man was laughing.
I threw open the door, but the illusion was gone.
And standing blankly in the doorway, I remembered.
How I had not taken my eyes off my daughter for more than a moment.
How I had been watching her through the window that day.
But I should have remembered the night I met Elise.
In the glass, the stars had danced.
* * *