Fiction: Nocturnal House

By James Callan

 

Here, in the nocturnal house, the nights are bright, the days are dark as sin. It’s a quiet place, where sound is swallowed whole, a tomb for beasts both macabre and unsightly. Dank and doomy, it’s the way we like it. Hell, we’re not precious, but we are very antisocial. The dark is our blessing. The quiet is our prayer.

It is beyond contempt when the patrons mar what is pure. When high heels click and clack like a metronome resonating from the netherworld. When screens diffuse with light, with sound, with flash photography. And please, don’t even get me started on those little fucking lights in kid’s shoes. It is an audio plague that echoes, that turns the heads of the bats that hang upside down. It’s a sensory assault that sways moths the size of your palm to kamikaze across the glass.

Every once in a while a cell phone goes off, a notification or a full-blown ringtone. From fish, to reptiles, to birds; fins shift, scales ripple, feathers flap. Some well-known pop song skewed by tinny speakers echos in the black abyss, wakes a dozen demons, all manner of ghosts, maybe raises the dead, raises the attention, anyhow, of beady eyes and gaping maws, of bared, serrated teeth. When even the turtles look miffed, you know that someone’s fucked up.

And it gets even worse.

Folks walk by, a veritable brass band in their designer footwear, Nike Lebrons as squeaky as two rubber duckies fucking. The frogs wince, close their third eyelid, their transparent, nictitating membrane. They can still see. They are still watching. But now there is a filter between them and the intrusion. They may croak behind their security blanket, retreat to water between breaths spanning hours, but more than likely they will remain still, silently cursing those platform heels, those kids’ shoes that pollute the night with colored light. Inevitably, someone will point and say “Look, it’s Kermit.”

Like the frogs, I dwell in the darkness. As if one of the bats, I hang around and do not speak. I watch, unseen, and study the patrons, humans that seem like beasts of a distant clade. The visitors do not search my corner. Off display, they don’t see me glare, don’t see me at all. I’ve been inside the nocturnal house for less than a week, but it feels like forever, time enough to have evolved to live in the dark.

I’m not a member of the zoo’s menagerie--not officially. I’m not a registered resident of the nocturnal house. I’m not even a member of the staff. I’m a great ape just like the rest of us. I’m diurnal, by nature, but I’ve found a friend in the featureless gloom.

I haven't always been a cave dweller, you know? Haven’t always lived in the dark. Not long ago, I worked outside. I labored under the sun. I’d come home to my trailer after a long day of mowing lawns, pulling up weeds, laying mulch. Before scrounging around in this Stygian grotto, before crawling on all fours like a wild animal, I was a respectable man. Okay, maybe not respectable. But I was a man. Before the eternal gaze of marbled eyes, the ferocious fangs catching the cherry glow of an exit sign, the frozen, angry pose of taxidermied predators…Before all of that shit, there had been plenty of light in my life. Sunshine to spare.

So believe me when I tell you: I do not turn to dust if I’m not stowed away in my coffin by sunup. It’s not like that. I was driven to this. I haven't always been nocturnal.

 

*

 

When I brought the wood chipper to the pawnshop, they asked if it belonged to me. When I didn’t say anything, they told me they are required to ask, but not required to believe me. I told them the truth: No. But they laughed, didn’t believe me. I walked out of the building with $600 more than I had, confused but satisfied.

When the ride-on went missing, my employers got wise. “First the chipper. Now the ride-on?”

I had told them the machines needed service. That I had brought them in for maintenance.

“How long until the repairs are finished?” The wife was trusting.

“Meanwhile, our garden is going to pot.” The husband never had been.

“Just a little while longer,” I told them. “Maybe next week.”

That evening, after deadheading the roses, I took the chainsaw and all the petrol I could carry. I loaded my car with the cases of scotch that the old man kept in the garage. I even took the circular saw, which wasn’t theirs, but a contractor’s who had been doing up their garage. On the way out, I smiled and took my week’s pay --my final pay. I told Mrs. Olson I’d see her tomorrow. I had no intention of ever seeing her again.

As I was pulling out of the driveway, I heard Mr. Olson shouting to his wife, “In the shop, my ass! We never should have trusted him. All those tattoos…It’s a dead giveaway!”

He wasn’t wrong, I guess. But it still hurt my feelings. Diurnal creatures have a way of biting without using their teeth.

 

*

 

Above the door, just as you enter the darkness, there are some glow-in-the-dark plastic spiders, each one larger than a grown man’s spread-out hand. They are fake as hell --the kind of creatures Captain Kirk would encounter when he’d leave the Enterprise to visit some planet and make passes at green-skinned women-- but they made one out of three toddlers cry, maybe one out of ten adults squirm, even shriek. People don’t like spiders. Not generally. Arachnophobia is in our bones. It follows us across the millennia.

A few days back, to keep from being seen by a snot-nose brat, his teenage, jailbait babysitter, I had to hold my breath, suppress a scream, when a real-life spider crawled over my forearm to settle on the spiderweb tattoo spreading out from the center of my elbow. Maybe Charlotte was confused, thought the ink was silk, an excretion from her abdomen, a sticky net to snare the crickets that find their way out of the leopard gecko’s terrarium to die underfoot, to converge in corners to become wraith-like husks, to become, overtime, dust, one with the darkness.

I resisted squashing the spider. I held back from flattening the gauze orbs that she carried, the silken spheres laden with her eggs. As the brat passed me by, I noticed he wore a Spider-Man costume. I never did see what his babysitter had been wearing --I was too busy undressing her in my mind. When they turned the corner I looked to my elbow. The web was there, as it always would be, as it would remain until my skin sloughed off my body sometime after my death. But the spider was gone, eight legs, 300 eggs, and all. Once again, I was alone in the dark. 

 

*

 

The ding of the microwave sounded in unison with the cops rapping upon my door. The tall one used his billy club to part the blinds to my kitchen window. The short one eyeballed the chainsaw on my porch that belonged to the Olson's, then eyeballed me eyeballing him through the partition in the siding I’d been meaning to fix for ages.

“Shane, is it?” He asked me.

The microwave was impatient, reminding me my Hot Pocket was adequately heated.

“Shane Dillard?” He asked again.

Even though his eyes met mine, I felt invisible, protected --me, being on one side of a wall, the short fellow with the badge on the other. Of course, that fist-sized hole in my trailer sort of ruined any pretense of concealment, any semblance of safety. “Shane Dillard, you know I’m looking right at you?”

I don’t know why, but I held my tongue. I just stared at the little cop, his round, pink face and ice-blue eyes. I might be crazy, but I think he may have winked through that ragged hole in my home. The microwave beeped again, the kitchen appliance getting antsy for me to eat my meal before it goes cold.

“Look, Shane, we can come back later,” the tall one said, peeking through the wound in my trailer. “But you’d be wise to let us in. Or, if you’d rather not, at least have a chat with us at the door. Hell, through this makeshift window if you’d rather. Go ahead and gobble down whatever gut rot you’ve got waiting for supper. We don’t want to spoil your meal, Shane. But we have questions, Mr. Dillard.”

“And we’ll have our answers,” the little guy intoned, no doubt feeling rather large.

I could feel the weight of the $600 in my back pocket. Like a two-ton stone, I felt the sheet of paper sag the floor of my trailer, the gravitational burden of the list of the Olson’s goods I had scrawled out onto a Post-it note. I examined the words, each letter an ocean of ink --chipper and ride-on-- each item crossed out after I sold them, the little square stuck to my fridge crying out my guilt in pastel pink. The canisters of petrol filled the backseat of my car. Bright red with yellow nozzles, they screamed out for attention. In that horrible moment, I wished they’d gone up in flames, wished that I had too. I wished to be elsewhere, to be submerged in shadow, yearning to disappear, or failing that, to combust.

 

*

 

I have been known to laugh my way through haunted houses. Those set-up scenes with blood-soaked killers and their dismembered victims, the strobe lights highlighting splashes of ketchup, the flaccid folds of latex masks and wild, nylon hair. What may induce a seizure in the epileptic, a lifelong trauma in a child, for me, only instigated amusement. There was nothing spooky about it.

The jump scares were my favorite part. Entertainment at its best. How all the others around me shrieked, sometimes let loose a fart in their momentary loss of control. How the actor with the rubber knife got annoyed that I didn’t budge, only guffawed, unfazed. I’d savor their irritation, their disappointment radiating beneath a generic Jason mask.

By comparison, the nocturnal house puts me on edge. Unlike a haunted house, it gets under my skin, burrows deep within me to trigger an unsettling apprehension. The plastic spiders don’t help my lack of calm, but it’s more than that. It’s palpable. It’s airborne. It’s dire, yet invisible, like a virus or poltergeist. My hairs stand on end, the room goes suddenly cold, and I become convinced I am being watched. And while I would never fear a kiwi bird or a mud fish in the brightness of day, here, among the simulated night, these timid creatures transform into monsters. Even the glowworms seem to give off a certain luminosity of doom.

There is something in here with me. Something dreadful. Something worthy of fear. It’s not just the caged beasts. Not just the crickets that feed them, the fish that never blink, the snakes that swallow everything whole, seeming to consume the very light of this gloomy world. It’s less evident, but heavier by far, than the click and clack of women’s footwear approaching from the hallway. It’s unseen and unheard, but it’s overwhelming. The darkness itself? No…it’s something more. Something worse.

 

*

 

“Okay, Shane,” the tall cop stooped on my doorstep so his face was level with the cavity in my trailer. “If you won’t open the door, that’s fine. Just look right here through this porthole window you’ve managed to fashion real nice.” He backed away and filled the gap with a face other than his own. Framed by the aperture in my trailer, I looked at a printed photo of a girl I’d seen a hundred times before.

It turns out the police didn’t come to inquire about the Olson’s chainsaw or chipper. They didn’t ask about the ride-on either. They came to ask about a teenage girl who had gone missing a few weeks before. I’d seen the missing person posters outside the pawnshop, at the mall, at the petrol station. Her face was everywhere. And come to think of it, I’d seen her in the flesh too. She’d loiter outside the liquor store, long legs on display. She’d ask folks who came and went if they’d get her a bottle. She asked me more than once. When I asked her about money, she said she couldn’t offer cash, but maybe something else. My mind wandered to all manner of dirty places, but in the end I just walked away. I never did learn what exactly was on offer.

I took a long look at the face peering into my trailer. She wore a sneer more than a smile. Pretty thing with wild hair, wild eyes, half animal it seemed to me. Being pretty wouldn’t serve her well if she had been abducted. Being wild... that just might.

“You know this girl, Mr. Dillard?” The tall cop asked me as the short one wandered around my trailer out of view.

“Know of her,” I said, cautious, but not lying. I was still thinking about the wood chipper, the 600 bucks and the fucking Post-it note that gave my guilt away like a bright, neon sign.

“Jessie Baldwin’s her name.”

“Okay. Nice name.” I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know where this was going. The microwave kept up with those little beeps that wouldn't stop urging me to retrieve my corner store meal.

“She in there with you now, Shane?”

Beep. Beep. Beep. The smell of low-grade cheese and ham oozing from a paper sheath filled me with fear more than it did hunger. Beep. Beep. Beep. “I don't know what you’re talking about.” And even though I was dying of fright, being eaten away by guilt, it was true: I had no idea why the cop was asking about the teenage girl who always mooched for booze outside the liquor store.

“You better own up, Mr. Dillard.” The girl’s face disappeared and now the tall cop was glaring at me in my kitchen. He looked around. He looked me dead in the eye. “You have Jessie in there with you?” Beep. Beep. Beep. I didn’t see it, but he made a movement behind the door. I may have imagined it, but I think I heard him unholster his weapon. “Tell me now, Shane Dillard. Do you have Jessie Baldwin in this shit box with you?”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I held my breath, my heart pounding like a piston in a steam locomotive.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Fear took me over, possessed me like some devil.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

At once, my senses heightened and I could hear the whole world. The telephone ringing three houses down the street. Crows squabbling half a mile away. The hammer of a gun clicking backwards, just beyond the hole in the wall of my trailer.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Then something different. Something sinister. Ring. Ring. Ring.

I heard it louder than any other sound. Shrill and horrific, it drowned out all the rest. And then I remembered. I knew why the cops came to look here for the young girl named Jessie Baldwin.

I recalled the scene from a couple weeks ago. Like always, there she was again, baiting the drunks outside the liquor store. Young, pretty thing, wild eyes, wild hair like always. She asked me for booze, didn’t seem to care what kind. And when I told her Sure, to hand over the cash, she just shook her head and smiled, tossed back that bushel of black hair and stuck out a long, white leg. Lifted that skirt well past the bend of her knee. My eye lingered for a while, but in the end I shook my head. I think not, I told her, and did my own booze shopping, never meaning to heed her beyond that moment which had passed.

When I came out, a bottle of Jack, or maybe it was Beam, I threw one of those stocking stuffers at her. One of those cute, miniature jobs that burn a hole in your wallet for one little sip. I got her a baby tequila. I didn’t drink the stuff myself, but it seemed like something she might pick out of a lineup of choices, like a recognized face in a queue of mugshots. I wasn’t even going to charge her. I was just being nice, a good Samaritan. But what does she do? She tells me I may not think so myself, but size matters. She held up her forefinger and thumb, an inch or less between them, and laughed. Laughed right at me.

Well, I wasn’t about to go beating on a young girl --good Samaritan and all that. But I wasn’t about to let some sassy brat begging for booze play with my emotions either. I’m a sensitive guy. I may look a little rough around the edges, but my feelings get hurt, too.

So I took her bike. I pushed her away when she clawed at my arms, my face. Maybe I hurt her a tiny bit, but I doubt it. She was tough, and she could take a little abuse. I laughed at her attack, her skinny arms flailing away like cooked spaghetti. Shoving her backward, I rode away on her pink bike, something she had probably been given years ago when she was still a little girl, or had stolen from someone’s front lawn. I set my Beam or Jack in the white wicker basket mounted on the handlebars and, as I peddled away, I offered the ungrateful bitch the middle finger, a whole lot of laughter to go with it. To rub salt in her wound, I rang out, over and over again, using that silly, silver bell as I circled around her. As I rode off into the dark, I filled the night with music, with one repetitive note: Ring. Ring. Ring.

And then I was back in my trailer. Back in the here and now. I heard it again. Heard it back behind my mobile home. Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hey, Danny!” The little cop called out.

“Yeah, Jeb?” The tall cop’s eyes never left my frozen face.

“I think I’ve got something here.” Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Whataya got?”

“I think I got the Baldwin girl’s bike!”

“Well, well, well,” said the tall cop. “Now what do you think of that, Shane Dillard?”

The microwave went off one last time, but before the third beep in the sequence I was out the door, past the tall officer I had pushed out of my way, well past the little fat policeman investigating the back of my trailer. I ran as fast as I could, faster than a silverfish in the dark. I ran on and on, forgetting what I was even guilty of, and more importantly, the crimes for which I was entirely innocent.

 

*

 

Whatever it is in the nocturnal house, it’s worse than any spider, plastic or the real thing. It’s worse than any wide-eyed owl who measures you with its stare, follows you with its rotating neck all the way to the other end of the room. It’s worse, I’d wager, than the guilt that eats away at a man, the corrosive blame that he hasn’t even earned, but carries nonetheless. It’s a heavy burden, even if unreal--the supposed abduction, maybe murder, of a human being, a girl who begged for booze and baited bad fortune with long legs and salacious trade. And how does that make me look? The guy with her little pink bike.

Sometimes, cowering in the gloom, I can hear the chime of that silver bell. I can feel the tassels hanging from the handlebars as they graze my wrist. Or is that just another spider in the dark?

I can’t live like this. But I must. Without the darkness, what would become of me? Outside the nocturnal house, to what extent would the light expose me? And now I’m beginning to doubt my own innocence. I’m beginning to doubt my sanity. Maybe I would, in fact, turn to dust. Maybe I’d vanish, simply combust, if the sunlight crept over my flesh.

And there it is, somewhere in the far reaches of the impenetrable darkness.  

Ring. Ring. Ring.

 

*

 

I had hopped the fence of the zoo more than once in my time. I knew well the little gap in the barbed wire that you’d only notice if you already knew it was there, if you’d fashioned it yourself. Climbing up that fence, I always felt like a monkey, like Spider-Man, a superhero, or maybe in my case, a villain, an actual spider.

It was no different with Bert and Ernie on my tail, those two cops who had come nosing around at my trailer. I ran straight to the zoo, right up to the known vulnerability in the fence. I called forth my simian ancestry to scale the chain-link perimeter. I dropped down on the other side, a tall wall of bamboo concealing me from zookeepers and visitors alike. Then, casual as can be, I walked through the emerald thicket to join the burned-out parents and their hangry children. I eyed the chimps who eyed me back. Almost human, yet unable to speak, they pointed at me, the only ones who knew that I didn’t belong.

My tummy rumbled, mourning for that Hot Pocket back home. But there was no way I’d risk going back. Not even to remove the Post-it note from my fridge, the list of goods I had taken and sold, the appliances belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Olson. As it now stood, that seemed such a little thing --a misdemeanor beside the mountain of a missing girl.

I made my way to the nocturnal house. I forged my way ahead into the deepest of dark corners in this world. I joined the bats, the spiders, and snakes. I burrowed like a mud fish. I lay still like a lizard. In the dark, I waited. In the dark, I remain.

Worst of all --in the dark, I am not alone.

 

*

 

In the nocturnal house the day is turned upside down --not just for the bats. From 9 p.m. to 9 a.m., the lights turn on, a mirrored perversion, a perfect half, an evil twin bisected from the conjoined hip of each 24-hour cycle. As the remainder of the beasts sleep outside under a blanket of natural darkness, inside, the nocturnal demons of the zoo rest in the glare of an artificial, electric sun. In this man-made morning, monsters are revealed. The evil things we think we feel at night show themselves to be false, merely imagined. Or: much worse, they present themselves, unconcealed, no longer supposed, but very real, present and horrific in the flesh.

Even the harshest of light could not steal the inky black depths of her outrageously wild, pompom hair. It bounced with her forward stride, with each leap and bound in my direction. As she approached, she bared her fangs, a gleaming canine, a metallic glimmer of dental work, braces banded in purple and pink. Her legs were long, having long baited the liquor store regulars, the addicts who couldn’t stay away, folks who maybe didn’t have the resolve to stay away from what lay underneath her skirt, those who were willing to share their bottle if she’d share her body. But I didn’t succumb to that. I didn’t buckle. I swear as these mud fish as my witness, I did not fold to desire. I remain pure.

But purity won’t save me from blame. And it certainly won’t save me now. Here she comes. An unfettered, runaway teenage beast. An animal with wild eyes, wild hair, wild antics. I took her bike and unwittingly mocked a lioness. I withheld the Jack or Beam, the meat from the apex savage. To avoid the threat of boarding school she did crazy things. She ran away. She chose a life of darkness.

And here we are, two nocturnal animals exposed by the light. It’s clear who is the predator and who is the prey. Her talons of chipped nail polish claw at my eyes. Her metallic snarl bites the pulsing snake in my neck. Her long, pale legs wrap around me, snare me, a boa constrictor or a deadly spider.

From behind panes of laminated glass, my murder garners an audience. One hundred eyes squint in the harsh light and see red if they can see color at all. I lay mute, utterly still, static like a prop, no different from a lizard. I am about as animated as a still picture of a girl, a missing person printout nailed to the wall. I am frozen, like the 2D image of Jessie Baldwin, even as I watch her, eating me alive, a fiery nighttime spirit, a nocturnal demon, unfazed by the harsh, daytime light.

 

 

 

 

 

JamesCallan is the author of the novels Anthophile (Alien Buddha Press, 2024) and A Transcendental Habit (Queer Space, 2023). His fiction has appeared in Bridge Eight, BULL, House of Arcanum, Maudlin House, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand.