Once, living in another city where the sky was a smeared chalkboard, I noticed a shadow on my wife’s yellow rain boots. It started out small, like these things do.
But soon it blossomed into an insidious flower.
The stain, in all its lusciousness and mute defiance, maddened me.
I took to cleaning it, spraying it with disinfectants. The shadow crept up the calves and sprouted a pair of opposing heads, snarling forwards and backwards like dragons on a crest.
I couldn’t let my wife see me cleaning them, or she would know that I knew.
I knew she went somewhere at night.
The question was where, and that was not a question anyone had been able to answer. Three private investigators had failed me, though I’d promised increasingly exorbitant rewards. Two had vanished. The last had sent me a cryptic text message at 3:12 am:
it’ all on you, buddy. peace out –
And then I heard nothing more from him, though I knew he still lived in the city, because once or twice when I entered a cafe I saw the flaps of his trench coat trailing around a corner booth, out the far door. Somehow he always knew when I was arriving.
He didn’t reply to my numerous texts.
So it became obvious one evening, struggling in vain to find something to watch, something to distract me from my suspicions, that I would have to follow her myself. I’d have to find the gumption to stay awake. I’d been working too much. I’d not been able to keep my eyelids from falling down. I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay awake. But now I would have to. I’d have to follow her wherever she was going.
“I just might have to stop drinking,” I said to the cat.
He looked askance but said nothing.
“For an evening or two.”
He curled up on the windowsill, his gray tabby fur dissolving into the indecipherable chalk-smeared sky.
***
When I approached the pharmacist about my problems, she said she could give me something that would help me follow my wife undetected, if that was what I really wanted.
“Do you think that’s what I should do?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s what I would do. I would ask her,” she said, “Unless, I suppose, if I thought there was some kind of danger, some kind of enchantment that’s making her disappear to wherever she’s disappearing.”
Enchantment. She had captured my suspicions precisely. My wife had been acting so strange, so listless, so unlike what I remembered from when we first met. How could I not have realized what was happening? Hadn’t she said something like this to me a few nights ago, when we were playing games on our phones:
“I don’t know what it is. Something’s come over me. I feel like we’re not seeing each other.”
***
Who would ever have thought that the back of an oven could open like that? She floated through the living room, not giving a second glance at me asleep on the recliner. (I kept my eyelids fastened tight and drooled a convincing puddle beside my cheek.)
She slipped on her boots and beelined to the kitchen.
The oven door creaked in displeasure at this nocturnal intrusion.
The last thing I saw was the outline of her heels getting smaller inside the rectangular frame of the sooty window.
***
Red leaves circle the tunnel, enfolding ancient slate bricks in a viny chain-mail that wavers and whispers. With every step, deeper beneath the city, a crimson spiral engulfs me, passes over me, washes me of some innocence or ignorance I didn’t know I’d carried.
She’s not so far ahead of me.
Even though she can’t see me, I’m cautious.
She walks with a candle in her hands, gliding at a solemn yet furious pace I’ve never seen before. What scares me most is that she cannot hear me.
I try calling her name, just to see what would happen. I thought there’d be no harm.
But she didn’t hear me at all. There’s something worse about not being heard. It’s worse than not being seen.
The pharmacist had said the pills would make me invisible. She had said nothing about side effects. She’d delivered no warning about me becoming a complete ghost if I exceeded the recommended dose.
I feel lied to. I feel betrayed. I want my money back. I want everything back as it once was.
***
The tunnel deposits us on a low platform at the edge of a shimmering green lake that fills a massive chamber. Sewer pipes high overhead loom dark as obsidian and make me think of a gigantic church organ buried sideways beneath the subway lines. There is no music but only the memory of a music that once stirred forgotten audiences with awe.
Her voice in its stillness startles me.
“I’ve come again,” my wife says. “To read from the book of love. To guide me across, I offer this extinguishment of the little light I carry.”
A soft hiss. The candle has penetrated the green water, The wax dissipates and spreads before her, forming a narrow sheen that extends beyond the shadows of whatever waits on the other side of the lake. Her yellow boots step forward on the glossy bridge.
I slip down to follow. The wax lingers just long enough on the surface for me to stay three steps behind her.
It is only now that we are stepping across this slick, evanescent causeway that I see where we are heading. How did I not see it before? Is there no turning back?
No, no, there is not. I want to clasp her hand and guide us away, but the waxy trail is already fading behind me, cutting off any attempt at running back, any chance of forgetting this passageway in our apartment and relieving my mind of the mystery of what it could entail.
We are headed, irrevocably, my wife and I, to that glimmering abode, turreted and heavy-slabbed, strewn with phosphorescent moss, waiting on the opposite shore like a faithful executioner: the Subterranean Palace.
***
When we first were dating, years before we had moved to the hazy city, we had strolled down an embankment beside a babbling creek, where dandelions wafted a bitter perfume.
“I’m going to start keeping a journal,” I said. “I don’t want to forget anything. I don’t want to forget how wonderful it is to be walking beside you, looking at caterpillars, feeling the breeze, just not caring about anything about the world beyond this creek.”
I gestured toward the thin, mucky ribbon with what was probably an overly dramatic emphasis.
She smiled, then didn’t.
“You might not feel the same way in the future. Things don’t last,” she said.
It seemed a thin cloud crossed the sun. All the dandelions along the embankment quivered. I resisted. I thought I could force hope down her like I could slip an antidote into a poisoned chalice before she sipped from it.
“Feelings come and go,” I said. “I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about the real things that lie beneath our feelings. They’re like whales or great figures that carry us. These massive things that form the foundations of our lives. It’s only that we forget them. But if we could remember them, then we would never lose our way. That’s why I’m going to write it all down from now on.”
She helped a caterpillar onto a leaf.
“I hope you’re always this way,” she said. “I hope you don’t change.”
Then, I took her hand and we walked a while longer.
***
We hesitate, in our isolated togetherness, at the corrugated iron drawbridge.
Please, Elaina, don’t walk any further.
Don’t approach the damp arched doors.
Don’t believe them when they open for you. They will swallow you and I whole. They will not spit us back out.
This is not a place where anyone should go.
I claw my fingers at the back of my throat, trying to make myself vomit, to rid myself of the pills that have made me insensible to her.
Elaina, if you can hear me, please don’t let that featureless servant guide you up the spiral staircase, to the upper reaches where only the doomed would go.
It’s not working. I shouldn’t have taken such a strong dose. The pharmacist didn’t say anything about this. I swear she didn’t.
Oh god, how long have you been coming here? How did I not think what you were looking for or what you would find?
I reach out and try to pull her back, but my hand slips through her torso. She winces and turns back. For a moment, I believe I’ve made contact. But she swipes the side of her shirt as if she’s removing a cobweb, then proceeds into the unlit foyer.
The great double doors shut me out. I cannot follow her up to the attic, which soon lights up with the soft glow of a red lamp. I hear the pages turning.
***
The next morning, I woke up alone. Her boots were not in the entryway. Neither was her purse or coat, though I’d not seen her take those things through the oven.
I stumbled across the apartment, tripping over the raised legs of the recliner, knocking the cat’s food bowl from the ledge.
He did not even deign to look at me from the windowsill.
My clothes, still damp from my frenzied return through the green lake, were piled on the linoleum floor of the kitchen, oozing like a gangrenous wound.
Naked and trembling, I opened the oven door. If it creaked, I didn’t hear. I heard nothing at all. The back panel would not budge. I pounded and called for Elaina, not because I thought it would work, but because I thought it was still expected of me to try.
After an hour or so of slumping against the dishwasher, I forced myself up from the floor and to the bedroom closet, where I retrieved a college-ruled notebook I’d once purchased from a dollar store.
There were gaps, great gaps, yawning chasms that said more than any ink could spill. I had stopped writing many years ago. I had not committed so much to memory after all.
Today, I can barely remember Elaina’s face. I remember the feeling of when we walked among the dandelions. I remember all sorts of feelings, at random times and unexpected places. There’s something I failed to record, something that would have made a difference.
I throw the notebook on the floor and something catches my eye. Toward the back of the pad, spiraling up from the flimsy sheet of cardboard, a mildew palace arises through the otherwise empty pages.
Ben Curl is a speculative fiction writer. His short stories have been published and/or produced as podcast episodes by Underland Arcana, Horror Hill, Night Shift Radio, and Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction and in the western horror anthology, Along Harrowed Trails, by Timberghost Press. He also teaches writing workshops in Lansing, MI, where he resides.
Published 2/14/24