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The house stands empty for half a year before he comes back. It sits there, lights off, and as he turns the key in the lock he imagines that his father is sitting in the dark waiting for him to come home, as he’d done on countless nights before. No matter how quietly he closed the door. The voice would say his name in the dark and he knew he was in trouble, that he’d always been in trouble, that trouble sat calmly in the quiet house waiting to get ahold of him.
But the house is empty. He clears out the bedrooms and crawlspace, scrapes mouse-shit from the kitchen cupboards, dumps the jars of discolored peaches that lined the pantry. He leaves the basement for last.
At the bottom of one box he finds a handful of pulp magazines that sit under a pile of invoices like hidden relics from another world, their colors faded but still powerful. He sits back on his heels and leafs through the first. 15¢ a pop. That had been the price of entry to the lurid conjurations of ghouls, bats, burial grounds, imperiled wanderers, hypnotists, crazed Mandarins, and the Symphony of the Damned. There had been one illustration in particular that drew him back again and again, a cloaked figure grasping at a man with gnarled hands against a criss-crossing backdrop of black ink.
If you looked hard enough, you could just make out what appeared to be jagged line of teeth set in a demonic face leering from the shadows.
Al had liked to think he was the only one that could see it. That it might have been placed there just for him, a secret link between him and the mysterious artist who etched such fantastical scenes into being. It was good to imagine that some things had meaning.
It was from a magazine like this that he’d ordered his first magic kit. Among the advertisements for Listerine shaving cream and Charles Atlas’ promises of a developed muscular system, there were more esoteric whisperings, bold snippets declaring: Learn How to Hypnotize. Protect Your Loved Ones. Order Tombstones to You. Rent Weird Books. Coupons to carefully excise with nail scissors, as long as the story on the other page wasn’t a favorite.
Drunk?
Believe in luck?
Do unseen powers direct our lives?
The pages opened up possibilities. They also opened a door to that way of thinking, the stupid kind, which told him that clutching onto a few reams of acrid glue-smelling paper could offer a way out from the mundane dread permeating the walls around him.
Stories to read in the dark. It was better to be scared on purpose.
He boxes the magazines up and drives them out to a pawn shop in some distant town. He likes to drive, likes watching the van’s headlights swallow up the blacktop for hours at a time. The bell over the door doesn’t chime when he walks in. That’s an omen in and of itself.
“What can this stuff get me?” he asks the woman behind the counter, who bares tobacco stained teeth at him as he deposits the boxes on the counter. “I just want it off my hands.”
“Sure, hon,” she rasps. “Let me take a look. You want to check out what we got, you be my guest.”
Al shrugs. He’ll save the charm for the high-ball, try to get her to eke up the price. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
In one version of events, he doesn’t bother to venture into the bowels of the shop. He casts an eye around, among the trinkets on the front desk, the bloodstone and quartz, faceted rocks and other sundry items of little value. A few sheets of flash paper catch his eye from a cluttered shelf. Harmless fun. Another silver ring or two, a few video tapes of an old show he and Max had used to watch on the rug of their aunt’s house called “The Magic Clown”—the magic word is Bonomo!— along with a new silk-lined top hat with an indecipherable name stitched under the rim.
In another, Al examines the glass cases filled with uranium glassware, the sickly green elegant carved tumblers and jars. Dangerous in its own way, but not lethal. He’ll be long dead before exposure gets to him. He comes away with a steel dog bowl for Samson and a few cans of paint for the basement, a secondhand impact driver for his tool-belt.
In another, he leaves with a stack of old photo albums tucked under his arm. Unknown families smiling from the beach, blurred white limbs in the water, a leg here, a hand here. Boys racing in the sand. Angular bodies scaling trees and rocks, or shoved uncomfortably into their Sunday best with shoes polished, hair combed into flat furrows of wheat.
No one gets hurt.
In this version, however, Al finds himself drawn into the back of the shop. A taxidermy deer head follows his passage with beady glass eyes as he brushes past the woven tapestries, the musty leather jackets, the ancient rifles, trailing his fingers over each surface until he comes to a dusty glass case. The air is thick here. His breath catches in his chest.
The mask leers out at him from behind the glass. The alternate mouthpieces are mounted beside it, twin devils frowning and laughing like players’ masks of old. Al’s fingers rest against the display case. He can already feel the wood in his hand, knows the way the pegs come together to slot each part in place better than he knows the construction of his own body. This is what he needs.
He bends down. In the glass, a distorted reflection of his own grinning face.
⛤
With the mask on, he can do anything. With the mask on, Al Shaw disappears.
⛤
There are things he can only do with his face hidden. He has known this for a long time. Greasepaint smeared across his face only goes so far. In the snow, in the freezing cold, it cracks.
With the mask, he pitches his voice in a way his father hated. His hands move from the wrist. He is light and full of air, like a black balloon, and he feels the possibility in things, that he is armed with a smile no matter what his voice says as it comes out of his mouth.
With the mask, he is a snarling dog. Samson hears him growling at the mirror and barks and barks until Al demonstrates the big reveal, removing each piece until it’s just him left. His pale unshaven face looks back at him. Drunk on the power of utter effacement.
“It’s just me, silly,” he tells Samson, scratching the dog’s ears with trembling hands. “It’s just me. See?”
Samson isn’t sure. Al isn’t either. The mask frowns down at them from the sink. He puts it away for a few weeks until the need boils over and he scrambles to free it from the box like a junkie, like Max digging around in the bottle for his last few pills, only calming when the straps are cinched tight around his head.
The blank wood sits over his mouth like a hand.
⛤
It’s been a year since he’s seen his brother.
He doesn’t want Max to see the house yet. Having him there closes off the possibilities that hover at the edge of things. He replaces the mattress on his bed, takes the old one down to the basement.
Calls Max up before he leaves. There’s a few dive clubs willing to have him, flash some magic among the flashes of tit. It’ll cover the cost of gas anyhow, and he’s been looking for an excuse to check in on his kid brother, who lies over the phone and says he’d love to see him.
Al takes his time driving south. Parks in national forests, the kind of places that can swallow a person up without a trace. He leaves the mask at home.
Max meets him in a diner. His sideburns are creeping down his jaw and his shirt is stained with sweat and hardened grease.
“You look like a bum,” says Al. “When’re you going to get a job?”
“Yeah, well, you look like a fag. You’ve got more fucking jewellery than my ex.”
It’s routine by now, a roundabout way to bring their parents into the conversation without raising the dead.
“It’s for the act,” Al says, although they both know it isn’t. “What happened to your face?”
Max’s left eye is a swollen bruise the color of an overripe plum. The eye he can see is blown wide, darting around the diner.
“This? It’s nothing,” Max waves, dismissive.“You look different though. Not bad. Just different. How’s the—?” He waves his hands, shooting invisible lightning bolts from his fingers.
Al shrugs. “It’s fine. How’s the writing going?”
“Oh, yeah, fine, fine, it’s going great. Swell, in fact. Hey, you get any money for the house yet?”
Al takes out his tobacco and starts rolling a cigarette with one hand. It’s one of the earliest tricks he learned, along with restoring shredded cigarette papers, palming dummy smokes, conjuring lit ones out of thin air. The reason he started smoking in the first place.
“I was thinking of staying,” he says, as measured as he can. He doesn’t look at Max. “I know it’s not what we discussed—”
“Oh my God, no, please don’t do this, man. Seriously? You want to stay? I thought we agreed, clean slate. Fuck ‘em.”
“I know.”
“Well clearly, you forgot. If you need me to come burn the place down, I don’t give a shit. It’s insured, right? I need the money, Al. Please.”
“Mom left you her place. If you want to clean it out, I’ll help sell it for you. It’s not so bad.”
“They’re fucking identical! I don’t want either of them, and neither do you, you’re just scared of having to make a choice, do something you want instead of what you’re meant to do. Why’d you think he left it to you in the first place?”
“Max.”
“Because he knew you’d come back. He always chose you.”
“Max, shut up.”
“He went and died there so you’d have to clean up his mess one last time. No one’s making you do anything. You just go along and do it. Fuck, man, it’s kinda sad, you know? There’s nothing there you want. No one’s going to pat you on the back and say you did good this time, you wanna know how I know that? Because no one ever fucking said it!”
Al reaches across the table and sticks his thumb into the split bruise on his brother’s cheek. Max flails backward, spilling hot coffee all over his lap.
“Ow! What the fuck, man?”
The pain on his face ripples down Al’s spine like hot water. He needs to leave, now.
“Here. Take it.” Al leafs through his wallet, throwing a wad of bills on the table. “That’s what you want, right? Why you agreed to see me?”
“Aw, come on Al. I’m sorry. It’s not like I don’t wanna see you. Stay, come on.”
“I’ve got to hit the road anyway.”
“Don’t be a dick, man. I walked here.”
Al knows his father chose him because, unlike Max, he didn’t complain. He just got on with it.
⛤
The phone cuts the night into jagged pieces. Al sticks the receiver into the crook of his shoulder, wiping grit from his eye. It’s Max. He feels bad for the way they left things last time, so hell, if Max wants to get loaded and yell at him down the line he’ll take it.
“You left me down there,” says Max, eerily blank. “You left me, Al. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry, okay?”
“I’m still here.”
Max’s voice comes to him through an underground tunnel. There’s static on the line, a sound like grinding cables that sets the hair on Al’s arms on edge.
“Where?” Al asks, fully awake now, a flash of sobriety. “Max?”
“You know where,” chokes Max, “You did this. You did all of it.”
“Calm down, Max. Tell me where you are, I’ll come get you. Have you been drinking?”
“I think I was afraid. That if I looked, I’d see you. Is that what you were afraid of, too?”
“You’re not making any sense, man. Just—”
“Well, I see you. I can see you, Al. I’m still here.”
Still half-asleep, he realizes the phone in his hand is from the basement. He’d followed the sound without thinking, down into the dark.
The dead receiver crackles into his ear.
Al drops the handset. It springs back on its cord and clatters against the wall. Some things are like that. As far as you might stretch against them, they always drag you back where you belong.
The basement is empty. No shapes in the dark. Just a copper-red scar bleeding across the wall and the shadow of leaves casting down a grey-dark filter across the concrete from the tiny window far above.
⛤
When he soundproofs the basement, some part of him tells himself it’s to block out the endless ringing of the phone. Anything that happens after that is incidental.
⛤
There had been a time when he’d worked in a feedlot, slinging heavy bags of grain that emitted puffs of dust that coated his overalls and settled under his nails like sediment. It had felt like the dirt was inside him. Watching the cattle lumber their heavy bodies up and down the chute without fear. Dumb animals. They didn’t know where it all would end.
The knowing is his gift to them.
Every year he orders a quarter. Chuck steaks, t-bone, no fancy roasts, not for him and Samson. The rest as ground. It’s better this way, he explained to Max, to fill the freezer in one go. Better to know the animal. Where it came from. It might be a chunk out of his paycheck, sure, but he makes sure to set the money aside in advance. He doesn’t live beyond his means. If he has a visitor, he can afford a few bottles of lemon soda, an extra carton of eggs.
⛤
It should be nice having his brother home. It should be manageable at the very least, if the basement didn’t pull on Al’s every thought, dragging him away from Max’s inane chatter to the locked door at the bottom of the stairs. Not one guest. Two.
He keeps the mask locked carefully inside his old trunk of magical paraphernalia. Max might be nosy, but he’s never understood his brother’s obsession with stage illusions. Things hiding in plain sight.
“Was it there?” Max asks the first night, pointing. “Did he—?”
Al looks. The armchair is just an armchair.
“Yeah.”
Max blanches.
“Shit. That’s, uh, that’s pretty fucked. Don’t you think that’s pretty fucked?”
Al shrugs. By the time he came back, all that was cleaned up. Part of him’s sad that he missed it, the final confirmation. Without a body, he still expects the shadow in the doorway. A familiar voice at the end of the line.
“Jesus.” Max rubs at his unshaven chin, letting out a nervous laugh. “Hey, it’s nice though, what you’ve done to the place. Was this left here too?” He waves the bottle of whiskey, most of which has already vanished into the depths of his own glass.
“It’s not mine.”
“Ugh, you’re still so straight-edge. Come on, have some. It’s not so bad—well, actually, it’s real cheap fucking shit, but hey, who can complain? It’s not like Mom’s here to whack us with some of her mind games.”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember those outings? To the mall?”
“She never asked me. You’re the one that wanted to go.”
“No, no, no, that’s where you’re wrong. She only took me on those drives when she knew I’d gotten into the liquor cabinet the night before. I’d be there sweating, hungover as shit, and she’d say ‘Oh Maxie, let’s go to the mall,’ except she’d take the long fucking way there, on purpose, every twisty little road she could find, and I’d be sitting there with my mouth clamped shut so I didn’t puke all over her precious car. The window roller was broken? And she’d smoke the whole time?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Yeah, well. Guess she wanted to discourage my bad behavior.”
“You made it into a big deal that I wasn’t allowed to go.”
“It’s not like I could say, hey Al, these new shoes? I got sick all over ‘em in the store so Mom had to get them for me. God, I almost died.”
“She liked buying you things.”
“Where the fuck were you, man? Sometimes it’s like you weren’t even there, the shit you don’t remember.”
Al chuckles emptily. Sometimes he sees himself from a distance, the casual gruffness to his voice, his posture modeled off so many men lounging in bars and break rooms, on stoops. To Max, he blends in. His brother’s always failed to recognize the real texture behind things. The gaps between words—the squeak of shoes on the basketball court, wet clotted grass, a smudge of blood sucked into the pavement.
Al does his best to steer their conversations away from the headlines, but Max digs his heels in. Leaves coke dust all over the couch. Messes with things that aren’t his. As long as it’s not the basement, Al can’t complain too much.
He winces at the sound of Max fiddling with the stereo. An atomic blast rattles the speakers.
“Jesus!” Max scrambles to kill the machine. “Shit, your neighbors must hate you.”
Wrong. Al Shaw is a model neighbor. They think him a bit weird, solitary, but always nice enough to talk to if they stop him in the street. He cleans up after Samson. Every so often, Mrs. Silberman leaves molasses cookies in cellophane parcels on his doorstep.
“Seriously, what the fuck, man?” Max asks, brandishing the tape shell with disgust, squinting at the faded label. “Where the hell did you get this?”
Al doesn’t like to listen to the tapes with other people around. It feels juvenile somehow, indulging himself like this, blasting the music and letting the dark rhythms open up a door to a different kind of power. It’s safer. With the throbbing in his ears, he doesn’t have to think. The weight of it adds dimension to the world.
“Oh, that?” he shrugs. “Grabbed it out of the second-hand crate. Whole bunch of junk.”
It’s a poor conduit anyway. He knows that now. Real power is the kind he carries in his hands.
“Must’ve cleared them out. Haven’t you heard of, I don’t know, Elton John?”
“Yeah, sure,” Al says, vaguely. “Put on the radio if you’d like.”
He thinks maybe Finney would like to go through some of the tapes. When you’re a kid, you look for the dark side of things most people try to hide; you know it’s out there. You want to listen. Want to make the darkness writhe with symbols of the arcane, the demonic horde, transform the banality of your suffering into something righteous and deep. No one else knows what it really sounds like.
To Al, it sounds like a child choking on thick bubbles of snot and spit and blood. The wet snick of his knife finding a home in the invisible seam between a scream and silence.
⛤
Never trust the fumble. A magician might look like he’s nervous, hands drifting to his mouth or tie, but in reality he’s acclimatizing the audience to a range of tiny motions. When he makes the real switch it’s invisible. He might drop his cards, apologize, start again—and in that moment, the seed begins to grow.
Starting again is never really starting again. The trick is already in motion.
The first attempt hadn’t gone right. Too rushed, too much excitement. He settles into the swing of things as time goes on, perfects the setup. Always lets them come to him. Tires of the older ones, after the blond hellcat breaks three of his fingers. A lot more trouble than they’re worth.
It’s not like anyone could blame him for getting a mad—he makes a living with his hands, doesn’t he?
When it turns out his faro shuffle is still as good as it ever was, he feels a little bad for overreacting. So he sticks to the easy routine. Middle school. No point getting worked up. Eggs splattered on the sidewalk, a tangle of balloons caught in the telephone wire.
A tempting crack of light creeping through the half-open door.
No one sees the fumble for what it is until Finney Blake.
⛤
He returns to the basement when the house is quiet. Finney is still lying where he’d left him, bleeding where Al’s fist had met his face. His eyes are half-open.
As much as things had almost gone horribly wrong, the adrenaline from seeing the open front door still shudders through Al like a bolt from the darkest rain-cloud. That feeling of mad power, holding a small struggling body against his, the glint of the knife in his hand. He’d almost killed the boy then out of sheer excitement, right in the street—but that wasn’t how it was meant to happen.
Al touches the mask, feeling the coarse grain of the uncarved mouthpiece under his fingers. It’s clear Finney doesn’t understand the rules of the game they’re playing, so it’s up to him to set him straight.
He sits down on the edge of the mattress. If he were to reach out, the boy’s bare ankle would fit perfectly in his hand.
“I know you can hear me,” he says. “I didn’t mean to hit you so hard, you know. But you didn’t give me much of a choice, did you?”
Finney’s eyes flicker dully.
“You don’t have to say anything. I just want to explain what’s happening here. Why you’re here. It’s all about the why for you boys, isn’t it?” His hands come up, mocking. “Why are you doing this to me? Why me?”
Nothing from the kid. Maybe he hit him harder than he thought. That would spoil things later.
“I’m going to make this very clear,” he explains. Behind the mask, his voice is soft. He sounds just like himself. The mask should change that too, but it’s late and he’s tired from the chase.
“First, I’m going to hurt you. This is something I want very much to do. Then I’m going to fuck you. It’ll be very painful for you. I’m going to force myself inside your body. You might feel like throwing up. Maybe you’ll piss yourself. It doesn’t make any difference to me. You might try to go somewhere else in that head of yours, make it all go away—but if you do, I’ll know.”
He touches his index finger to Finney’s forehead.
“If you go away, I’ll bring you back. Okay? After that, I’m going to use my knife. It’ll hurt for a while, but then it won’t anymore. That’s why you’re here.”
After a long moment, Finney’s head slowly moves up and down.
“I know,” he mumbles. “It’s what you did to the others.”
“Clever boy.”
Al brushes some of the loose hair away from Finney’s face and stands up, stretching. In order to look down, he has to tilt his whole body, the eyeholes of the mask like peering through a viewfinder. The scene impenetrable and impossibly far away.
“I have one question though,” he ponders, stopping at the steps. “How did you unlock the front door? You shouldn’t know how to do that, should you?”
The boy lifts his head with some effort. His hollow eyes seem to look through the mask, at Al, gaze boring into him with its adult contempt.
The corner of his mouth twitches into a faint smile.
⛤
Some time later, he brings the boy a magazine. You didn’t think he’d gotten rid of them all, did you? Letting go of the past is much harder than a quick trip to the pawn shop. Certain things stick.
Al slides the tray across the floor, watches the kid shovel leftover chow mein into his mouth with his bare hands, swallow down the glass of milk in a few greedy gulps. It feels good. Permitting those few simple things most people take for granted. You are allowed to do this because I let you.
“Wash your hands,” he says once the plate is empty. “Go on.”
Finney looks at him warily, bits of broken noodle smeared across his face. After a long moment, he gets up, rinses his hands under the sink, comes back and crouches on the far edge of the mattress.
“I’ve got something for you.”
It’s almost funny, the distrustful way Finney eyes the outstretched magazine in Al’s hand. He has to come closer to take it. A calculated risk.
He’s not like the others, Al decides. There’s something fine about his sweeping hair and the thin angles of his face, even under all the bruising. Delicate, almost, like a girl’s. The others were healthy, corn-fed boy scouts. Even the delinquent, with all those badges, that filthy mouth, had been part of a club that looked and sounded just like him.
Finney’s not like that.
In a way, he’s like Al. He doesn’t fit in anywhere.
Al watches how the boy stares down at the magazine’s illustrated cover, trying to catch a spark of appreciation. It’s his favorite, the one with the demonic face lurking inside. Weird tales and unknown things in the dark.
Finney runs a finger over the first page.
“Albert,” he reads, then looks for Al’s reaction.
He’s only wearing the top half of the mask, leaving his mouth visible; the kid can see it twist into a frown. He’d forgotten he’d printed his name inside the cover a lifetime ago. A stupid mistake.
Al schools his expression. There’s not much time left. Anything the kid knows will be lost to the lye pit with the rest of them—so what if he has a name to pin to the mask, and not the man behind it?
“Is that you?” Finney asks cautiously, his voice flat. “Or is that your brother?”
“Who said I had a brother?”
“He’s not upstairs right now. You wouldn’t be down here if he was.”
Al sucks air through his teeth. “That’s a lot of guessing, Finney. You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know.”
“Who says I’m guessing?”
It unnerves him a little, the unbroken line between them. Like the mask isn’t even there. Like he’s looking straight into Al Shaw’s cringing, pathetic face.
Al scoops up the tray and stands, angered by the doubt twisting inside his chest. He’s meant to be the one with the power here. He’s the one that writes the law, decides the names for things.
Before he can make it to the door, the phone rings.
The plate almost slips through his fingers. He flinches, catches Finney glancing from the phone to his face, then to his white-knuckle grip on the tray. The boy can hear it too.
A memory slides into his mind as the phone trills out, piercing and insistent. He had been five or six years old the first time he spent the night in the basement. He can’t remember what he did. It doesn’t matter.
All he remembers is that he was in the basement and at some point, the phone rang, just like it was ringing now.
He’d imagined it was someone coming to rescue him. The picture had taken on shape as he clambered atop a box to unhook the receiver from the wall with numb fingers, that there were people out there that knew where he was, and they were coming to get him.
When he’d answered, the line had been full of dead air.
“I don’t want to be here,” he had begged. “Please. It’s too dark. Please.”
A long silence. When he finally spoke, the other boy at the end of the line had sounded far away and impossibly tired.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said. “I can’t help you.”
The line had gone dead.
Sometimes he feels like the first fourteen years of his life were played by someone else. He knows that those things happened, but they may as well have happened to his stage double: the stand-in, the boy sawed in half. Someone that whimpered and cried and made all the right noises.
When the smoke cleared, there was Al Shaw. The grown man who keeps a bag of lye in the back of his van and knows the best way to swing an axe. Either you stay weak forever, or live long enough to put on muscle and pull yourself out from under the ground with your own two hands.
⛤
As a young boy, he’d been afraid things would end in the basement. The fear returns to him now, wrapped tight as telephone wire around his bloodied throat—he sees the shadow at the top of the stairs, hears his brother whimper beside him, the clatter of the hatchet on the floor.
He knows, at last, that they've both come home for good.