There’s a wide, red, irregular stain on the curtains in an upstairs bedroom of a house.
Or there used to be. It’s probably still there. I used to walk by on my lunch break everyday and think how much it resembled blood splatter.
It was there a long while though - a week, maybe two - and it’s silly to think someone would leave a blood soaked curtain up and where anyone passing by outside could see it.
The leaves in Fall are beautiful, don’t you think? I miss walking along the narrow sidewalks and inhaling the scent of drying leaves mingled with wood smoke from chimneys.
One day, a yellow car sat in the driveway of the house with the “bloody” curtain. A young lady stood on the stoop, and it seemed an introduction was occurring between her and a slightly older couple, the apparent homeowners with the bloody curtain window.
I normally don’t stare, but the woman was attractive and energetic. The couple, on the other hand, were the opposite: Pale, exhausted, and grim. It made for an oxymoronic sight.
I thought little of it until I passed the side of the house, and I saw the curtain had been removed and replaced with a fresh one.
However, I came to the quick conclusion that they wanted to make a good impression on this young woman. Perhaps she was a social worker or potential employer. It didn’t matter because it wasn’t my business, and the sun pierced the grey sky like a divine surgeon and the leaves, of course, the leaves.
The next day, I noticed the car remained where the young woman had left it on the street. She must have stayed the night or come earlier than yesterday. Again, not my business until I saw the curtain. My footsteps gave up, it seemed, of their own accord as I stared. They had put back up the bloody curtain.
Curious, I attempted to work out mentally why those curtains would disappear and then reappear while I finished my walk. I couldn’t. It made no sense.
Her yellow car stayed on the street all that week and the next, and then it was gone. The curtain remained until the following day; a fresh one appeared. I couldn’t remember the last, clean curtain to say for sure if this was the same one or new.
A new car, a grey SUV, was parked on the road. I didn’t see the homeowners or who, if anyone, had gone inside.
I assumed someone had, however, because of the curtain change.
Certainly, the one incident may have had nothing to do with the other. My assumption that the curtain and the young lady with the yellow car were related could be wrong.
But if I assumed correctly? My curiosity made me drive by after work. The car was still there. The curtain fresh. What was going to transpire - if anything, if I was right about events being connected, if - had not yet occurred. So I waited.
It gets dark early in October, and I was starting to get hungry, and I was tired from work. What the hell was I doing here?
I stepped out of the car for a cigarette. That’s when I heard muffled laughter and music coming from inside the house. The curtain room flashed as if a light bulb swung back and forth on the ceiling.
Then a woman screamed.
Then the fresh curtain received a bloody splash from somewhere within that room.
Bursts of laughter followed from more than one person. The homeowners? Who else could it be? I listened as I debated on what to do and the lightbulb kept swinging and they were laughing uncontrollably, insanely. Beneath the noise, I thought I heard whispered words. It could have been someone just talking or pleading.
I dropped my cigarette and took a few steps toward the house. If it wasn’t 1989, I would have had a cell phone and called the police. But it was, and I couldn’t think of what else to do besides what I ended up doing.
I knocked and rang the doorbell just as I heard another peal of laughter as someone shouted, “Please, don’t!” from upstairs. I swear I heard it. That’s why I started ramming my shoulder into the door. That squishy, liquid explosion sound came again, an impact against the bloody curtain. It had to be. What the hell was going on in there?
Well, I never found out. It took awhile to break open the door; I’m not a big man. That was my first and last break and enter. I didn’t notice the laughter had ceased, and when I got inside the scene was more bizarre than expected.
Two women, the young, attractive one I’d seen before, and a new one, the presumed owner of the grey suv outside, sat on a couch in an identical pose. Their backs were straight and their hands folded over their knees. The woman I’d seen previously was wearing the same clothes she arrived in: jeans and a t-shirt. The other was dressed casually as well.
More than a single set of coveralls had been hastily discarded in a corner of the living room. The flash of a television I couldn’t see sporadically illuminated their faces, which were placid and strange in a way I didn’t understand until I got close. Their eyelashes weren’t made of tiny hairs; they were spider legs, striped and slender and moving as if the arachnid body had slipped under their eyelids. Neither woman blinked or seemed bothered by the miniscule tapping of the legs against their naked eyes.
The place smelled of cooking meat.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
The pallid homeowners stepped into view from where I thought the television was. “What are you doing in our house?” the woman said with only mild concern. I’d just busted through their door, and yet they weren’t in a state of shock or terror or on the verge of defending themselves. Instead they waited. They just waited.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” I managed to ask.
The gruesome pair exchanged a dreamy look and then smiled wide, revealing teeth so putrid they were green. “You must mean the tomato sauce.”
“He saw the tomato sauce on the curtain,” the man said.
“We spilled tomato sauce on the curtain,” the woman said too fast.
“That… No, you didn’t,” I said.
They kept smiling. The women kept staring straight ahead at the flashing light I thought was a television.
“It wasn’t tomato sauce,” I said with more conviction.
The police didn’t use their siren and snuck up on me. Suddenly, I was thrown to the ground and cuffed. They didn’t say a word as I repeated, “That’s not tomato sauce! Look at the eyes! Look at the eyes! It’s not tomato sauce!” Into the back of a cruiser, face against the cold seat, the car started and drove straight to the jail.
“What’s going on?” I struggled to a sitting position and could see through the window.
“You’ll be held here until trial,” the driving constable said over his shoulder.
“What? Why? I didn’t do anything. What am I being arrested with?” So went my tirade of unanswered questions. I was processed like an inmate, made to turn over my clothing and wallet and keys.
They brought me to a cell in the general population of criminals at Millworth Institute.
And that’s where I’ve been for thirty-four years, awaiting a trial I’ve long ceased to believe will ever come.
I’ve had hellish experiences inside Millworth, and I’m old now and no longer care what they do to me. You can’t kill what’s dead. I wrote down this story and gave it to a friend who said he could get it to you, AP Cleriot. Finally, someone is looking into the strange experiences and injustices in Bridal Veil Lake.
You’ll help me, won’t you? Me and the others stuck in here and forgotten?
I had a visitor the other day. It was the man from that house. He looked the same, worn out and rotten, but unchanged otherwise. He sat at the table and I hesitated to go to him until I remembered there was nothing more to lose.
After I sat for a second, he leaned toward me and whispered, “It wasn’t tomato sauce.” Then he laughed, a horrible, boundless sound full of madness. He stood up to leave and I begged him to stay and tell me why they changed the curtains, tomato sauce or not. Apparently, I could still be hurt by these people.
He smiled.
“Ask yourself,” he said, “what would have happened if we hadn’t?”
“Why?” I asked. I was no one before Millworth too. “Why me?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
No more clarity came from that meeting. I held my head in my hands and could only see his legs and shoes. He was watching me suffer, and that, I feel, was the point all along.
They plant suffering and reap our pain like a crop.
Oh God, help us.
They are here in Bridal Veil Lake.
Elston