Chain Letter
by Earl HartwigAll that morning and into the afternoon, Anne sat by the window in her apartment telling herself that this time she wouldn't go back. She wouldn't go to the house.
She'd dreamt of the place again last night: empty rooms, bare floors, light slipping through dusty windowpanes. Even as the dream came apart around her, she could still smell his breath, taste his sweat. That was when she knew that she could never give it up. She'd fight, but she'd do it anyway. She always did.
From her chair she watched the sun climb the sky. Clouds the color of pencil lead rolled in and snow began to fall. Hours went by and still she didn't move. Noon, then one o'clock, two, the toast she'd made long cold on the little end table beside her. The cup of milk at her elbow went warm, soured in its glass. Outside the streets filled with traffic and emptied and filled again, black pavement wet with slush.
Sitting there she thought about a lot of things, but mostly she thought about John: the way he'd looked, the way he'd touched her, kissed her. He'd only been gone four years, but sometimes it felt like forever.
As she remembered him, she looked down at her hands; she always kept them covered by the gloves now, even when she was alone. It didn't take much to see that the fingers were empty by almost half, four in all, starting from the pinkies and working in towards her thumbs. She snapped her palms open and shut, hissing at the pain sinking into the narrow bones there. They always hurt when it was cold, a nagging, rusty ache like fishhooks in her flesh.
Pain meant that you were alive, didn't it?
As long as she felt it, she was okay, right?
She sobbed once, the sound very loud in the still apartment.
When the bells in the church a few blocks over began to bang out the five o'clock hour, she finally stood up and went into the bedroom. It was getting darker as the snow drove down, and she had to feel her way in to the nightstand.
The revolver lay in the top drawer, catching the last of the day's light along its stubby barrel.
She stared at it for what felt like a very long time, then pulled off the gloves. Where her missing fingers should have met her hands there was only livid scar tissue, stretched and shiny, skin taut over bone. Anne traced over the marks, felt the nubs of the separated knuckles beneath the thin meat.
Yes, it had hurt, but she had done it well. Neatly. Just as the old woman had said she had to.
It's easier than you think. If your knife's sharp enough, you probably won't feel a thing until it's over. Just a little jerk, like you've got a puppy teething on you.
She'd said it looking up at Anne, her own hands hanging at her sides, somehow much too small inside the mittens of gauze she had worn from the wrists down.
But honey, believe me, there's more to it than this. More than you know. What you did tonight, it's - expensive. And you don't just pay in blood and tears.
The woman had smiled, baring little yellow teeth like kernels of corn.
You pay with yourself. Body and soul. You pay.
Yes. She had.
Anne took the gun and sat down on her narrow mattress.
She remembered the feel of him through the sheets, the oaken headboard carved with twisting vines, cool wood against hot skin. It was still there in the house. She had gotten rid of everything else, but not that. The old woman had said that was part of it, too.
Where he loved you. Where you joined.
Anne put the revolver to her forehead and thumbed back the hammer.
Only she couldn't do it. Instead, she dropped the pistol and began to sob. Still crying, she stood and stripped off the clothes she had worn for the last three days - flannel shirt, jeans, wool socks. Down to her underwear, she turned to the floor-length mirror beside the door.
The woman staring back at her could have passed for forty instead of twenty-eight. Thin, haggard, too pale from too many nights of wine and pills, the Seconals and Dalamines. Her ribs showed through her skin, and dark circles rode the flesh below her eyes.
On her left foot there were just four toes. On the right, three; the big one and its neighbors.
She snatched a brush from the dresser, dragged it thorough her unwashed hair. Yanking at the worst of the greasy knots, she padded over to the closet.
The bag was black plastic, "Heaven on Earth" across the front in red letters. Inside was the teddy: black as well, edged with lace the color of cranberries.
She stepped out of her panties and pulled on the lingerie. It didn't hang right on her body - loose in all the wrong places - but she laced up the front anyway. Back to the closet again, this time for a pair of black pumps, the slinky cocktail dress that glistened like wet coal.
She couldn't meet her eyes in the mirror as she dressed; the rasp of the zipper going up her back and it was done.
The old woman's voice again, urgent now.
Do you believe? Because if you do, it will happen. You'll meet him again, and you'll be able to go on.
Anne picked the gun from the bedspread and put it back in its drawer. Another voice in her head, her own this time, asked if maybe next time, she wouldn't stop.
She silenced it and smoothed her skirt over her thighs.
It was time to go see John.
There was still a little light left in the sky by the time she swung the Buick off the two-lane blacktop and onto the long gravel run of the driveway. She began to slide and gunned the gas; the car lurched, fishtailed, plowed on. It was still snowing, a silent rush of big flakes that skated across the windshield and clogged the wipers.
To either side, the yard marched right up to the edge of the road, high grass matted down by three or four inches of fresh powder. She cracked her window a little and listened - silence except for the ice and stone crunching under the tires. She took a deep breath of the clean air and felt her throat burn cold. She'd stopped crying, her eyes red and glassy in the rearview.
"Can you hear me?" she whispered to the night wind.
Faster now, snow fanning up behind her.
She slid around the last bend and let the car roll to a stop. There it was, not twenty feet away - red brick, tan siding, almost lost in the shifting curtains of white. It was a good-looking place, or had been once. Some of the trim was starting to crack and peel, and one of the shutters on the second floor hung from a single hinge, flapping in the storm like a broken wing, but other than that things had held together.
As soon as the house had hit the market, the offers had started pouring in, along with one she hadn't counted on, one quite different from all of the others.
You didn't sell it, did you? The place where the two of you lived? Is it gone?
Anne turned off the headlights. She could still see the house, a little darker than the night around it.
I know you don't know me, but it's important that you listen.
And she had listened - though not at first.
Five minutes, and the old woman had been saying that she'd found her through John's obituary. Ten, and Anne had her hand on the phone, ready to call the police. Finally, half an hour later, they'd taken the stairs down to the street and Anne's car.
Even now she couldn't figure out who had seemed crazier - the old woman with her half-hands and stories, or herself for believing. Either way, they had come here: she'd parked alone in this very spot and had gone inside alone while the stranger waited. And when she had come back out, not with a stub yet but rather a cut on her palm leaking blood like tears, the woman had smiled.
He came to you, didn't he?
And Anne had nodded, not because of something she'd seen but because of something she'd felt. Because for just a moment, as she'd drawn the blade across her flesh, she had felt one of John's hands on her back, squeezing.
He had touched her.
The old woman had hugged her then. Where Anne should have felt her breasts against her arm through their clothes, there was only something that gave too much, that shifted under the bandaged lady's coat. Something that felt more like balled-up cloth than nipple and flesh.
People only had so many fingers.
Anne turned off the ignition and took the flashlight from under the seat; when she opened the door, the wind almost tore it from her grasp. The cold bit through her thin coat as she went around to the trunk.
The things she needed were inside of a small black duffel that John had used to take to the gym. She grabbed the bag and started for the house. Twice she slipped and almost fell - under the snow, a layer of rotting leaves that no one had been here to rake had frozen into a pad of ice.
The front door was swollen in its frame and she had to shoulder it open. It was dark inside; she'd had the power shut off, the water and gas, too. That was the only way she could afford to keep the place. She flicked on her light and moved in, the air stale in her nose.
At first, she passed the stairs and went into what had been the kitchen. She played the light around the room. Cabinets standing open. Dusty countertops. She bent down and traced a gloved hand over the linoleum of the floor. Hard. Cold.
This was where he'd been, eyes open, hands balled into fists. He'd bitten his lip as he'd fallen - blood had slicked his chin, his teeth. He'd already been cold by the time she'd found him, but the doctors told her there was nothing she could have done anyway, even if she'd been there when it happened. Something wrong with his heart, they said. Something that had been there all along, but that no one could have known about until it had killed him.
Twenty-nine years old.
She let her head fall back, listening to the wind buffet the side of the house.
"John?"
Nothing. She went back to the steps and climbed up to the second floor. The hallway stretched the length of the house - bathroom, guest room on the left, their bedroom on the right. She shrugged off her coat and let it fall to the floor, her eyes picking over the carpet, the walls. There was blood there, spatters of it soaked into the runner, a streak running along the wallpaper. Some of it had been here for a while, crusted a deep purple that was almost black, and some was much newer, still the color of rust. She touched one of the more recent stains with the toe of her shoe.
It was hers, of course, but it looked so strange spilled out here in the open. She tried to think back to the night she had last been here; everything was foggy, vague. The memories of what happened in this place never seemed to stick.
The spots left a trail that ran between the bathroom and the master bedroom. Her eyes lingered on that last door. It was closed - had she pulled it shut the last time she was here? She didn't know.
Into the bathroom. More blood. The sink was slathered with it, the mess dried into caked layers. Droplets had fanned onto the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet.
The old woman had explained as much as she could as they sat there in the car.
The house is important, but it's not everything. It'll be easier to see him if you're in a place he knew, a place where he spent a lot of time. I don't know why - I don't have all of the answers - but that's what I was told. And there are some things that you're going to need no matter what. First, a place to hold the flesh and blood. A bowl. A dish.
Anne set her bag down on the toilet and drew off her gloves. From the duffel she took a matchbook and a squat, red candle the size of a coffee can. She set this between the faucets, lit it, and turned off her flashlight. The flame quivered, sending shadows climbing the walls.
You need light. A fire, a candle, something natural. Not too bright, though. Just enough to see by.
She shook out the match and went back to the duffel. When she stood up this time, she was holding a small plastic bag. Inside were a few delicate-looking white flowers, each carefully pressed and about the size of a dime.
The flowers. They...help. With the pain. I've never been able to find out what they are exactly, but they work - for a while, anyway. Some kind of herb, I guess.
I think that's what does it - what let's you see them.
Anne tapped three of the blossoms onto the edge of the bloody sink.
Were these little petals what kept bringing her back here, a junkie looking for a fix? No. She'd tried eating them, without the cutting, in the apartment. Just a headache. No John. No drug.
Though that didn't change what she'd become. Not an addict. Just a slave.
If you ever need more, you can take seeds from the stalks of the last of what you have. It'll take a couple of months, but that's better than running out all together. And don't worry about them not being any good. They last a lot longer than you'd think.
She looked at her drawn face in the mirror, then took a deep breath and put the flowers into her mouth one by one. They dissolved on her tongue and a sweet taste, something like animal crackers, flooded her pallet. At once, the darkness around her seemed to swell and go velvety, the candle flame brighter, almost white in its radiance. She closed her eyes as prickling numbness spread from her lips to the muscles of her face.
Her breath seemed to thrum in her lungs, pulsing like a living thing. When the sweat breaking out on her body went cool, she turned to the bag and brought out the knife.
It was something that John had found with her late father's hunting stuff while they were cleaning out his place. John had still gone out by himself back then, up in the mountains, so when she saw him looking at it she told him to take it. She'd come across it again in a box in the closet when she'd been getting rid of everything to move to her apartment in the city, held onto it. Then came the old woman and her secrets, and a memento turned into something more.
The blade was about eight inches long, heavy gray steel ending in a handle of sandalwood. The tight grain of the grip had once been a mellow golden color, but now it was stained a dirty brown with her blood. It was heavy in her grasp as she hefted it and faced the sink.
By now the room seemed to be throbbing around her, vibrating in time with the beat of her heart. When she put down her left hand, she felt the air tighten around her like a wet blanket.
The knife came up, and she thought of him - sixteen, twelve years away from dying facedown in his kitchen. That summer he'd been a lifeguard at the township pool, and one day a little girl had almost drowned.
From the entrance to the park Anne had seen the crowd of people gathering at the water's edge and she'd started running. She got there just in time to see the only man she had ever loved breathe life back into the tiny body. The girl sicked out a gout of water and started screaming for her mother. John had started crying, but he'd been smiling, too. She didn't think he'd ever been as handsome as he'd been right then.
She thought of his hair bleached white from the sun, his tan hands shaking, and far away, she heard something stir in the hallway behind her. She brought the knife down hard.
A tug where her middle finger met her hand, then the click of metal on porcelain. Warmth spurted over her hand and by the door, a bare foot slid across the tile floor.
Anne looked in the mirror and there he was, watching her. He was nude, the hair on his chest and legs very dark in the candlelight.
"John."
He nodded. He never spoke when he came to her. By now the knife had grown slick in her grasp. It twisted in her hand, the sharp edge fetching up against her wrist.
For a moment she pushed hard enough to almost break the skin, to make the last cut that would end all of this. Then they would really be together again.
John's hands closed over hers from behind. The blade fell into the sink with a clatter.
After that, things moved quickly - the sensation of being lifted by strong arms, her shoes falling off. A mouth pressed over hers; she kissed it back, tasting something like the flowers she had just eaten.
He carried her out into the hall, her blood pattering to the carpet. A door opened, footsteps on a wooden floor, and then she was being laid out on the bed. The old blood caked into the sheets crumbled as he climbed on top of her.
"John..."
He kissed her throat, then slipped the straps of her dress off her shoulders and began to run his lips over her collarbones.
Anne sighed - the world was spinning now. She'd lost a lot of blood, too much, maybe. Her side was warm and clammy with it. She didn't have long.
"John, please...please say something. Just this time..."
He stopped and stared at her with those dark eyes and she thought he wouldn't answer. Then he leaned in, his breath tickling her ear, and whispered a single word.
Her eyes shot open. John nodded. He smiled, and as the darkness washed over her, she managed to smile back.
When she woke, light was seeping through the closed curtains and she was alone.
She lay their staring up at the ceiling, wondering if it was the next day or the day after that. She was hungry, but not very. Just one night this time.
Then came the question that she always asked herself. Had it really happened?
She looked at her left hand - no middle finger. Where there should have been a bloody wound like a weeping eye, there was only new, pink flesh that looked like a patch of sunburn. No scabbing.
The first time she'd gone all the way, she'd been afraid that she'd seen things all because of the flowers. But hallucinations didn't explain the healing, the mending that kept her from bleeding out.
Anne untangled herself from the soiled sheets and rubbed off as much of the dried blood as she could. That done, she dressed. She was about to leave when she stopped and did something she had never done before in the years that she had come to this still, empty place.
Walking to the window, she opened the curtains.
It had stopped snowing. The sky was a clean, clear blue. A new morning.
A new chance.
She went to the bathroom to gather her things. Everything there was as she'd left it, the candle burned down to a puddle of wax.
No, not everything. The finger itself was gone. They always were.
Downstairs, she paused at the door and looked back into the house.
"Thank you, John."
The building ticked thoughtfully to itself, and she stepped out into the winter sunshine.
Three days later she found the article in the paper.
It was the photo that caught her eye, not the headline or the short article that followed. While the old woman had never given her name, Anne would never forget that face. Now it was staring up at her in grainy black and white.
She looked younger in the picture - her eyes not yet sunken back into her skull, her lips still full and curled into a smile. Her age was given as only forty-eight. Anne couldn't believe it.
You pay with yourself. Body and soul. You pay.
There wasn't much to the article, and Anne soon read it enough times to remember it by heart.
- discovered by police after complaints from her neighbors that...
- apparent suicide, however, signs indicate that she may not have been trying to...
- a number of older injuries...
- opinion of the medical examiner that this was indicative of self-inflicted...
- mutilation...
In the end, Anne tore out the story. She took it into the kitchen, threw it in the sink, and put a match to it. Opening the kitchen window, she watched the thin finger of smoke drift out into the cold air.
When the paper was gone and there was nothing left but ashes, she flushed them down the drain.
She did not cry as she watched the charred flakes swirl away.
It was about two weeks after her trip to the house that Anne decided that she might want to go for a walk in the little park a few blocks over. There wasn't any real reason - she'd just woken up that morning thinking that maybe it would be nice to see something past these four walls that she'd spent so long staring at.
She took a shower, got dressed, and went down to the street. The day was warm and sunny for February, and most of the people bustling by on the sidewalks were carrying their jackets. Anne fell into step with the throng, letting it carry her along.
It wasn't long before she realized that something was different today; everything seemed so alive, so there. Sounds and smells swarmed around her like honeybees - perfume, sweat, a child laughing, the clock of her shoes on the pavement. Everywhere she looked, the colors seemed brighter than before: the yellow wink of a cab flying by, the emerald twinkle of the sun catching a bottle in a trash can.
She didn't know it, but by the time she had crossed Bertram Avenue and entered the park, a small smile had crept onto her face.
The commons were more crowded than she had thought they would be. The snow that had fallen the night of her visit to the house had melted away, leaving grass so green that she thought the color would come off on her hands if she touched it. People sat on the ground, eating lunches, reading books. Living. She took a seat on a bench, trying to look everywhere at once.
Behind her and to the left, a child called out. She turned around to find a boy maybe five or six years old pushing a toy truck through the mulch at the foot of a sapling. His father stood close by, watching.
Something in her went cold when she saw the look on the man's face. It was an expression she knew, maybe because she herself had worn it for so long. He was okay whenever the boy looked up at him, but whenever the child went back to playing, the mask fell away.
From where she sat, she could see he still wore the ring.
A tear rolled down the man's cheek and he quickly armed it away; that was when Anne knew for sure. Not in her mind, but somewhere deeper, darker.
Why me? Anne had asked the old woman. Why did you teach me this?
I told you about it because that's just the way it works. I looked for you, and then I watched you, same as someone watched me a long time ago. And you needed it. It's like a chain letter, I guess. One day you'll do the same and pass it on, too - not because you want to, but because that's the way it's always been. On and on and on.
You'll meet someone who's lost what you - what we - have lost, and you'll help them find it again.
Wasn't something bad supposed to happen if you broke the chain?
The man started when she walked up to him. His son stared at her, then asked, "Hey lady, what happened to your fingers?"
The father started to scold him, but Anne put her hand on his arm.
"I was in an accident."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Was it a bad one?"
"You could say that."
The boy started to say something else, then nodded and went back to his toy. Anne turned to his father, who was stammering out an apology.
"Listen, I'm sorry about -"
"Don't worry about it. Kids are kids."
She paused, looking into his eyes. They were blue, shot through with little specks of gold.
"Nice day, isn't it?"
©Earl Hartwig
Earl Hartwig is currently a graduate student and (hopefully) will soon find employment as a secondary level English teacher. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005. When he is not attending class at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, he is busy reading, writing, and working truly heinous service industry summer jobs somewhere in the Greater Pittsburgh area. If you happen to be a school administrator looking to hire a charming, well-qualified young man, you'll be happy to know that Mr. Hartwig has not and will not contact other planes of existence via sacrificed body parts... although that would make for interesting conversation with parents on Open House nights.