Twins

The twins, they were almost identical, they dressed so nonchalantly but still ended up picking the same clothing out of their piles. Nobody ever asked why they had two of everything, we must have assumed that was how twins came. Physically, they never seemed to notice they looked the same. They hardly interacted beyond shared whispers but it was understood in the House that they were two different people, and to somehow happen to mistake one for another could have grave consequences.

Marabel was a tormented girl, scarred in such a way as to encourage her unbridled id to inflict terrible injuries upon the other children. Like a preteen De Sade she would lure a confused little cousin up the stairs to the attic, at the very top of the House, and there she would come upon them. There would be her favorite pair of restraints hidden in the corner, and there in the faint shadow cast from the small window, with a view of heaven, there were a pair of scissors. Once ensnared, she toyed with her prey, and soon becoming bored she began to cut; first clothing, and then, their flesh. She held them down and cut them to pieces, defenseless children who thought that she was Selene, her sister.

Selene was gentle, a graceful girl whom the children seemed to flock to, like a mother hen. Selene would make sure they were well fed and that they would take their baths and be in bed by nine. She helped them with homework and changed diapers when she had to; and in her quieter moments there was almost always a pleasant interruption by an adorable toddler. She would find them a rag doll toy and send them along. When she wasn't tending to her flock, Selene seemed to hover in place, like a non-transparent apparition locked in a looping pattern of slowing fading in and out of reality. If no one was watching she sometimes looked like the static on the television screen. Her eyes were blue like the babble box showing the aux channel, never-ending and bottomless.

I don't know who raised her. I do know Selene looked after Marabel for a time, which always kind of mystified me because Marabel was 7 minutes older than her. I also did overhear a conversation in the kitchen once when someone said Marabel killed their mother with a knife from the kitchen, when they were little. No one said an age, and I had to go before I got caught eavesdropping.

Someone said once he could see a resemblance in me and the twins, one of my drunk uncles holding on to the stair bannister. I gave him a scowl and ran down the hallway. I don't want to look like either one of them.

Grandma said there had been a curse laid upon the house the night the twins were born. She said their Ma wasn't supposed to be having twins, but she delivered them in the kitchen, during a really bad thunderstorm, blood dripping through the partition in the table. Grandma said she had to help their Ma during the delivery, because the girls came out fighting, with the cord wrapped around one's neck. That baby came out blue, but once Grandma slashed the cord she started breathing and everything seemed fine. After that no one was sure which baby had been almost stillborn, they looked so much alike. I have my suspicions.

I was born in a hospital, like a normal child should be. I ain't nothing like those two.

I hate finding Marabel's victims one she's through with them. I never know what to do. I found Emma in the third floor bathroom, crumpled in the tub. I tried to ignore her and back my way out of the intrusion but I could hear her struggling to get my attention, and I couldn't ignore her. I closed the door behind me and looked at the damage. Her eye makeup had streaked to her ears, dragged by tears, and there was something wrong with her eyes and the way she stared at me. Marabel had removed her eyelids, but left the rings of eye shadow, not knowing how much was makeup and how much was caked blood from the sloppy wounds. Marabel had covered her body with a dirty old blanket that she must have found in the attic, in one of the old boxes.

I asked Emma what she wanted me to do, since I'm just some dumb kid who found her. She shook her head back and forth. She didn't say anything, but she was crying. I cracked the door open a tiny bit when I heard footsteps down the hall coming. It was Selene, but I wasn't completely sure it wasn't Marabel, so I didn't move, and I prayed she wouldn't come in, but my heart just about stopped when she pushed the door in and found me and Emma, who started kicking the sides of the tub, scared it was Marabel coming back to hurt her more. But the thin frail girl stood in the doorway, looking at the two of us that was in a way unreadable, so distant that it seemed she was watching us through a telescope. It seemed there was blood coming down the inside of her leg, running down to her slipper, staining the white cotton, and she smoothed my hair in a way that I knew it was Selene, and she eased me from the room so gently, told me there was stew ready in the kitchen, and so I walked away, knowing Selene would take care of everything. I noticed the sound of the door locking, I couldn't help not feeling it reverberate through the hallway.

I never saw Emma again.

Doorway

This is a Doorway.

Someone had seen fit to staple wallpaper to the piece of plywood covering the doorway in the closet in my bedroom. It kind of matched, but not really. You'd look at it and know it was a half-assed job, the way the fixture in the room twinkled off the staple backs, set into the paper in no apparent pattern. No one would say who did the patchwork over the door, but it was understood that I was not to pull off the wallpaper and move aside the wood to expose the small door, only three feet high and almost as wide, small enough for a child, but an adult would run the chance of being trapped in the enclosure should they decide to uncover the door and try the latch that held it closed and stepped over the threshold.

They told me to leave it alone, and so I emptied some boxes in the closet so I could make a dummy stack in front of the door, easy to move when I knew I could work in silence, in peace. My progress has allowed me to preserve the visual integrity of the wallpaper, where in reality it came off in one whole piece, adhered by old wads of chewing gum. The board was not nailed to the wood beneath it, and the first time I moved it, I came away with a deep splinter in my left hand, which ran from underneath the webbing of my thumb through the top few layers of skin, and it left a black outline as a reminder.

There is no door knob, but rather a small latching lock mechanism that somewhat resembles the trigger of a revolver, and when you slide your finger in and fire, the door swings inward, into deep murky nothing that I dare not enter. There's something down there, something wholly unpleasant. I don't understand whose bright idea it was to close off the entryway to something malign with a quarter-inch slab of plywood and a big swatch of flaking plaster paper covered with yellow sunflowers. But I've opened it three times, and looked in long enough to hear something moving deep within the passageway. It sounds like it could get hungry, but I don't know what it prefers to eat.

Diana taught me a new game to play. She calls it Bloody Mary. To play the game, you go into a dark room, without windows, with a mirror and a candle. You light the candle and stare into the mirror, and once you're ready, you repeat Her name three times. You will see her reflection, standing behind you, and you must remember not to turn around in fright or surprise, because she can steal your soul from your body and then inhabit it, taking over while you exist in limbo for the rest of eternity. When you see her, you must stay calm, and you can ask her a question, any question at all, and Bloody Mary will tell you the answer. She can see the future, and she can change it too if you want her to. Mary will take care of whatever you want.

I conjured Mary, with the closet door closed tight, the rest of the house fast asleep, and with my back to the covered up door I called her name three times, and in the dark I saw her, the face of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her hair was black and hung past the border of the mirror, and her eyes were tiny explosions, sparkling like a chemical fire. I closed my eyes for a second and I felt something like tendrils easing past my body, as if I had been floating through thick seaweed, and she waited for me, waiting for my question. I knew what I wanted to ask her, but I was too scared. She told me to close my eyes, and when I did I saw her standing next to me, but it felt like she had extended past her own physical boundaries and had somehow swallowed me up in the flutterings of her flowing dress, individual threads pulling away and bringing me closer to her, in the darkness of my closed eye imagination, she showed me the doorway behind us and somehow it had been uncovered, and the entrance seemed alive as she had me try the latch. It opened, and as the door swung inward we were drawn into the opening like the water swirling down a drain, and we slid down through darkness into a long tunnel, the two of us locked into a tighter and tighter embrace as we sunk downward with the slope of the tunnel, like some forgotten vestigial air duct.

Somewhere near the center of the universe the passage ended, in a long empty room whose walls went on forever. Mary untangled me from her tendrils and affixed me with a cold stare. I felt so scared of the thing that was sleeping down at the other end of the room. I couldn't see it, but I could hear its heavy breath, lumbering as if it were having a hard go at the task of breathing in and breathing out. Mary led me by the hand into the dark, and we got closer and closer to the other side of the room, but I couldn't find the beast. Mary shook her head in sad desperation. She told me the truth, and to hear it made my lungs explode in an awful wail and I fell to the floor and beat my tiny fists in the dirt. I didn't mean to turn and look at her, when we were upstairs. I just got a little scared, spooked enough to jump and kick the candle over, and in the act of pulling away Mary caught me falling and pulled me through the doorway. It was the only way out for me, when the carpet caught fire and it spread to the empty boxes, and it quickly turned into a tiny inferno. She said the flames ate me up, and I knew she was telling me the truth. I felt my burnt limbs a whole lifetime ago as they turned to ash inside the closet.

Sometimes I can hear things, at the other end of the passageway, and I will go to the opening and stare in, wondering who's at the other side of the closed door. I wonder if they did anything to close it over, so no one will ever find me here in the bottom. I shriek and make a racket hoping they will hear me but I don't think I'll ever be found. Even Mary went away after a while. I tried to follow her down the passageway but something kept me from getting very far at all, and she disappeared into nothingness. But, she kept me company for a while.

THE JAR

Hello there, if you're reading this it means you have happened upon a story I just wrote here in the dark, listening to Hairway to Steven and 26 Songs. I like the idea of short fiction, and the websites that cater to that style of writin. I'm just gonna put the story here, and you read it if you like. Working title: the jar

I feel the need to tell you outright that I have, in my possession, a jar that I believe contains the disincarnate spirit of a young woman who died much too young. I could show you the simple Mason jar, its lid sealed shut with candlewax drippings of a rainbow of colors, melted with no apparent pattern. Inside the glass, there is a little pool of liquid, almost invisible unless you pick it up and disturb the jar.

I could tell you that She doesn't like that at all, that it really pisses her off, but you scoff and pick up the jar from my bookshelf altar, and you peer through the rough glass at the puddle, and I would feel her energy gathering in the room like a thundercloud until you set down the jar and look at me and smile that stupid grin, the one that means, you're a complete dipshit. However, I could tell you that I am certainly no dipshit. I feel that I could tell you quite a few things, more things than you could ever imagine. But first off the bat, you should know about the jar. The one you just unsettled. That's a weird story.

I used to be the kind of man who would hop the fences of graveyards after dark, and explore terrains that look so much different than they do in the daylight. In the light of the moon, everything takes on a certain twinkle, catching the reflection of the faintest star. I don't trespass anymore. I haven't done it in twenty years, and I am not an old man. I'm young, still young enough to remember the follies of my youth. I have had time to reflect on my actions, and my transgressions prevent me from breaking any more laws.

But I did it. I climbed over the rusted fence, in the dark and still, no cars in the parking lot, no headlights down the street. I threw over my bag and followed its transjectory. I explored the unfamiliar sprawl of the cemetery until I happened upon the jar, placed at the center of the upturned earth. I saw moonlight reflected in the glass, and I saw her face for the first time, reflected as if she was staring into a mirror. Her eyes were filled with fear and surprise. She was helpless, trapped in the glass by some strange magic, some horrid curse that imprisoned her soul inside the jar.

Do you want to know her name? Lily Abgel. I read the headstone, freshly engraved. I made a rubbing of the writing, with my charcoal and roll of paper I always carried on these trips. The earth beneath my feet sunk as I crouched and made the transfer. She was only twenty years old when she died. Just like that, she was gone.

I could tell you I heard people coming, cutting through the stones, approaching so swiftly that I felt I had no choice but to take the jar and run. That fact is somewhat irrefutable, since I still have the jar here in my possession. I wish I could tell you more, but I know practically nothing else about her. I searched the local newspapers for her obituary, for a story that should have been there. But it wasn't. There was no Lily anywhere I looked, not even in the library archives. She only seemed to exist in the graveyard, but when I went back the stone was gone. The grass was just beginning to grow again and the name became Leonard Sentence. Leonard was 93 when he died. I don't understand that part, but I have my suspicions.

You don't have to believe any of this if you don't want to. I completely understand. But I have no intention of deceiving you with any of this. I just want to tell you about the jar. I should have told you this part right at the beginning, so I am very sorry for that. Lily, she spends most days staring out of the glass, her face gets distorted by the bends so you see slivers of reflections of a sullen impatient girl. She never aged, forever preserved. But forever can get pretty tiresome, or so I have been told. Sometimes, it can get unbearable in here, when she gets into one of her fits. She goes batshit when I drape the black cloth over her, because she hates the dark. And that's when drawers start opening by themselves, and the channel gets changed on the tv, and all of the radios will turn on at once. My neighbors get pissed when this happens late at night and they've complained to the super. So, I really try to keep on her good side. Try not to ruffle her feathers. She likes it when I have visitors. She tells me she gets tired of looking at me all of the time, so that's why I invited you over, and that's why I'm telling you all of this.

I know this is weird, so forgive me in advance, but she likes to play a game whenever I have company. She sits on the shelf, and she knows I'm going to lead you over and tell you just a little bit about her and how she ended up in the jar. And she will correct me if the story leads astray even a little, oddly enough. I hear her in my head, feeding me lines whenever I trip up. But her game involves whether or not you pick up the jar or if you leave it alone. That's the hinge this whole relationship swings on. She gets the ones who shake her and upset her eternal relative tranquility, because for reasons she won't explain, she's going to end up taking your soul.

I'm really sorry. She won't let me tell anyone not to pick her up before you do it or not. Those are the rules that I have to play by. Please don't take it personally. You don't have to believe any of this if you don't want to. Just don't believe anything will happen.

She makes me, just know that. She makes me bring people over. I know we work together but it's nothing personal. I never know who will disturb the jar and who will just think I'm a nut. And the people who think I'm a little funny in the head, I usually end up becoming pretty good friends with them. We stay in touch. People who shake the jar, they just end up going, I hate to say. They just die, no apparent rhyme or reason, they fall to the ground or swerve the car into the oncoming lane or they go to bed and just never wake up.

But the night they die, I see them inside the jar with Lily. They're scared shitless, and she, well, I am not really sure what she does to them, but they're always gone by the next morning, and then she's back to staring out on my little room. She says she'll help me if she can, so I help her. But, maybe none of this will happen to you.

I hope it doesn't, because you seem cool. I really wish you didn't pick up the jar.