Qualia

Everett pushes Alayna’s termination paperwork into his desk drawer as she walks in. She sets her article proposal in front of him and slouches into one of two chairs on the other side of the desk, then tries to sit up straight.

His feet bounce as he reads the proposal, heels tapping against a new and expensive-looking office chair. Alayna debates complimenting him on the chair or the shoes, but she’s never complimented him before, so it’d be weird to start now. Clara, the sports columnist who sits at the desk next to Alayna’s, told her that Everett didn’t dress or decorate this way until Alayna started working there.

He takes his readers off and rubs his mouth, looking from the paper up at her again. “Why haven’t you brought this to me before now?”

“Cy isn’t exactly forthcoming about—”

Everett closes his eyes, running his fingers along the socket rims. “Regardless, you know I have to ask; do you even have the bandwidth for this story right now?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Below the desk, she presses the blade of her thumbnail into her forefinger.

“You know why.”

That look in Everett’s eye makes her want to throw herself out the window. He doesn’t understand, nor does he want to; but maybe that’s her problem, wanting to understand too much … because it leads to feeling too much. She imagines the warm summer air, how her clothes would whip against her skin as she falls twenty-seven stories down.

“I’m fine. But thanks for your concern.”

“Okay, but even if I believe that… the story’s been done. Every true crime podcast has covered this case to death, so what value is your version adding?”

“I’m going to interview him, which only the police have gotten to do.”

“How are—”

“I’m staying at his house for the week, so…”

“Uh-huh, and does he know that you intend to write this article?”

There’s a fraught silence. “Yeah.”

Everett breaks into laughter. “Jesus Christ, you really are out of your mind….” His smile turns contemplative, and he considers her like something he’s on the fence about buying. “Fuck it, you’ve got three days to send me an outline.”

The next day, Alayna is cruising down a narrow and twisting two-lane highway. She and Cy explored the nearby eastern trails during the summers she spent on the expansive Ahler property, camping out there just the two of them. Those summers had been an escape from life after her own mother’s death, for her and her father. As she watches the familiar trees go by, she discovers that they don’t look familiar at all. She makes a mental note to ask Cy if the forest looks different to him, but would it be worth it to ask? Maybe he’s blocked everything out about this place, between then and now. That would explain a lot.

She frowns, keeping an eye out for a hairpin curve close to mile marker number 94, invisible to anyone that doesn’t know where it is. She spots it, hits the brakes, and cranks the wheel to full capacity. She’s faced with a steep road ahead and she shifts gears, driving slowly through the tightening and tapering forest where shadows compound with every inch forward. The breeze and birdsong hush. The incline, always curving to the left, contrasts with the sensation of a descent that sloshes between her ears. Ten minutes later she emerges from the corridor into a clearing where a mass of crows scatters from the treetops; they take off to the east.

The Ahler House appears. Its three vast stories are somehow more impressive than they used to be and its abundance of bygone years are observable in a single worn lane over the veranda. Its olive veneer is neglected at the edges, and its handcrafted windows draw the eye into a well of nothingness.

Mr. Ahler’s image remains in one of these windows. The headlights of her father’s car starkly illuminating two eyes like wet black river stones set into a flood of hueless hair and flesh, everything else devoured by the deep rural dark. They had ripped down the driveway, and she stared out the back window into that crushing darkness, wondering if Mr. Ahler was still watching.

She now wonders the same thing.

Some of the surrounding trees are marked with spray-paint initials, some fresh and others fading, likely soon to join the stumps that border the treeline. She parks in front of the house and spots Cy smoking at a patio table to the side of the house. She sits and watches for just a moment. Though his features are blurred from this far away, she registers the small flicks of his pinky that ash his cigarette. She finds the deepest of comforts in his predictability; there’s a certain atonement in knowing someone well enough to anticipate such small things, making up for the chaos of the world... and of this house.

“Started again?” she asks. As she walks over, she notes the dozens of spent filters littering the gravel at her feet

“Fuck off,” he says, opening his brass cigarette case and handing her one that’s hand-rolled.

She puts it in her mouth and he lights it for her. “You good?” he asks, dropping his Zippo into the pocket of an old sweater that she’s never seen him wear before. She recognizes it from somewhere. She only lingers on the thought for a moment before she forgets about it. She studies the filters on the ground again, noting that some are waterlogged and others aren’t. She nods, taking another very deep drag.

“Yeah, of course I’m good.”

“Just think it’s strange you asked to stay out here.”

In the moment, the suggestion spontaneously spilled out of her mouth, and Cy agreed to it before she had time to backtrack. But this feels inevitable; she would have ended up here, even if she hadn’t suggested it.

“I don’t know, I guess I need some closure? Seems like the right time.”

The heavy oak door rolls open, and she crosses the threshold of every nightmare she’s had for the last fifteen years. She watch Cy, unsure of what to say. He tosses his keys into a basket by the door and slips off his shoes The luminous wood floors and peony fragrance don’t belong in a space that’s supposedly unoccupied. Where’s the dust? The smell of stale air?

“Does the groundskeeper live in the house?” she asks, scrutinizing the line of shoes next to the door as Cy crosses the foyer.

“Ed? No. But I’m glad you mentioned him because I almost forgot about the leftover soup he put in the fridge,” Cy says, entering the hallway. She quickly kicks off her shoes and jogs after him.

The hallway is longer and narrower than she remembers, and entering the vast dining room is a relief. They skirt around the massive banquet table, under which she had spent a few holiday nights, eavesdropping on their two fathers talking business. Their discussions never made any sense, but hearing about it had made her feel important. Cy shoves through a push-door and holds it open for her. The cream-white tile is visible, and she remembers it being in the crime scene photos. She thinks about how odd it appeared in the bright white camera flash, contrasted with red.

The echoes of this place have, at some point, fallen silent. But seeing those tiles awakens provokes reverberations once again, and something moves in a long-abandoned tomb.

She lingers in the doorway, her feet rocking under eager legs while her fingers pick at the seam of her jeans pocket. She scans Mrs. Ahler’s yellow terrycloth apron hanging from a nail, her food-splattered cookbooks lying in a neat stack on the counter, at a dark stain that has settled into the grooves of the yellow linoleum.

Cy opens the fridge, humming a flat tone, then turns to look at her. “Hey, you okay?”

Alayna’s bloodless face shrivels back into the dining room. Cy hurries toward her as her lower back finds the edge of the banquet table. “Why the fuck am I here?” she asks the floor, gripping the chilly varnish. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

Cy watches her and rubs her back until she starts pacing and shaking her hands, going back and forth in tight ovals. She focuses on the carpet, the way it flattens under her weight, the synthetic texture between her toes. Cy says he’s sorry, that he shouldn’t have let her come here, that he’s—

“Shut the fuck up!” she yells, fingers latching over her head. Pacing, pacing. He takes a step back, watching. She wants to slap him, to cause him pain for asking if she’s okay, for apologizing. He’s never talked about this place, about that night, and she’s never seen him cry.

“I just—” She takes a deep breath and licks her split lip. The saliva burns. “I need a minute to chill out.”

His fingertips brush her arm as she passes by, and she flinches away. She stops pacing and his hand drops to his side.

Dissonant, nerve-plucking birdsong trickles through an open window in another room. The longer they say nothing, the sweeter the birds’ voices become and the clouds outside drift away from the sun. A single ribbon of light passes through the window and across her back, thawing the skin it touches.

She finally looks into his face, which is warm and soft and human. He smiles back at her.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, stepping in to give her a hug. She lets him.

His phone trills in his back pocket, and they both twitch.

“Sorry, do you mind?” he asks. The golden light fades and the birds grow quiet again. She shakes her head and he whips the phone out, a frown deepening at the corners of his mouth with every line he reads. He says this should only take a minute and brings the phone to his ear while staring at the floor, drifting back toward the hallway. He drags the door shut behind him.

She goes across the hallway and wanders over to the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room, keeping her gaze locked on the soft gray-black ripples traveling across a central pond. A duck and its babies drift in circles, pecking at liquid silver, their reflections warping beneath them. One of the heftier ducklings nips at his mother’s back feathers and the mother flaps her wings and the duckling swims away. What a brat. It then turns its attention on one of its siblings, biting at their neck and stepping on their back, pushing them underwater. She searches for the mother, who she finds watching with resignation. It turns its head and swims in the other direction with the rest of the babies. She wonders if they tried to stop the duckling before, or if they accepted it from the start.

The sound of a heavy object dropping below the baseboards; as far as she knows, this house doesn’t have a basement.

She turns back to the pond but the ducks are gone. She scans the surrounding area because there’s no way they moved that fast. As she scans, her reflection comes into focus. Her hair is lank and flush with her head and water glistens on her skin. She reaches up to touch dry hair. The taste of saltwater flushes her mouth and she gasps.

“Evidently,” Cy says, and she jerks her head around to see him walking toward her. She swallows the taste, trying to shake off… whatever just happened.

“My boss needs me to hop on a call for about an hour. You gonna be good for a while by yourself?”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to drive down the road just a bit for better reception.”

Alayna shrugs. “I’m not your keeper.”

Within four minutes the front door shuts behind him and she listens to the lock slap into place. As his SUV crawls out of sight into the encroaching dusk, the windows are dusted with the outset of a fresh rain.

She turns to face the empty house. A distant door sways on the breeze and the brass knob thumps against plaster, infusing the silence with a slow and resonant pulse. A serpent-like tension constricts her chest, her breath, and it tightens with every thought of the pain she so narrowly escaped.

She looks for any company to keep, anything that could loosen this unbearable grip of death. She looks across the hallways and through the library’s window, where she can see a light turn on in the groundskeeper’s cabin.

“How long have you worked here?” She’s standing just outside the bathroom wearing a bathrobe she found in the closet. Her attempt to wash everything away down the shower drain was foiled by black water.

“Dunno,” Ed the groundskeeper says, poking his head behind the shower curtain.

“Cy hired you a few years ago, didn’t he?”

Ed leans down to smell the tub and says “Nope, Cy’s old man hired me ’fore he died.”

She squints at his broad, lumpy back. “And, what? Cy asked you to stay on?”

“Can I just do my job, please?”

“Sure, sorry.”

He stands up with a heavy grunt, wiping his hands on his jeans. “I need to go downstairs to figure this out. Grab that bag for me,” he says, pointing at the filth-laden duffel full of tools next to the sink. Then he walks out. His enormous thunking steps quake through the floorboards.

Toolbag in hand, she follows him out of the bedroom and down the main hallway to a door she doesn’t recognize. There is no handle. He takes out a massive ring with at least thirty-five keys on it. She does math in her head, noting that there can’t be more than fifteen doors on this entire property, including his cabin. He finds the right one and uses the leverage of the key itself to pull the narrow door open, presenting them with a humid black pit. He turns almost completely sideways to fit through the frame, stepping down onto a set of stairs. He slaps a switch on the wall and a small overhead light illuminates the path. The howling of wild dogs outside grows dim as they descend.

“Has this place always had a basement?” she asks, her bare foot hesitating before taking the first step down. Her sneeze breaks through the dust he’s kicked up with his boots.

“Yep, far as I know,” he says and they enter a gloomy unfinished room with a damp dirt floor and the scent of freshly moved soil. Wooden beams are erected in sparse pairs, gradually becoming lost in the darkness of the far end. Ed walks into it, his silhouette becoming nebulous before he yanks a pull chain and a single jaundiced light flickers on but crackles and dies before she can see what lies beyond it. He grunts and returns to the corner near her and starts messing around with a tangle of pipes. She keeps a safe distance to avoid getting sprayed with any fluids.

“So, did you get to know the family at all before… you know.”

“Hand me that,” Ed says, pointing vaguely at his bag. She hands him what she thinks he wants, which is accepted. He sighs. “Sort of, I guess,” he says, not looking at her. “I think Wayne came over for coffee three or four times. After they died, Cy asked me to stay on and we’ve lived in mutual silence since then.”

She stares at the wall for a beat, the unseasonal coldness of the dirt against her skin making her shiver. “Wait, you’re saying he still lives here?”

“Yup.”

She’s often visited Cy’s apartment in the city. Cy’s whole life is in the city, and he never talks about this place. She’s silent for a moment.

After a pause that’s lasted too long, she asks “Is he in and out a lot?”

Ed shrugs and says “You’re his friend, you should know.”

“I mean, I don’t know why I should.”

A pipe hisses and putrid steam clouds the small window above it. She sees flecks of viscous liquid on the pane, and it looks similar to paint … but nothing down here is painted.

“Then, what makes you think I would know anything?” he asks, throwing a piece of metal on the floor.

“Because you live twenty yards behind him?”

Ed makes eye contact for the first time, loosely pointing a wrench at her. “If you wanna know this shit, ask the man yourself,” he says, busying himself again. She lets silence fill the room for a few moments.

“You said Mr. Ahler came to your cabin for coffee a few times. What did you guys talk about?”

“Look,” he says, his voice now quiet, his chest expanding and contracting heavily. He turns away but he doesn’t go back to what he was doing. He glowers at the wall.

“What?” she asks.

He draws his mouth tight, on the verge of saying something … but, without saying anything, he returns to work on the pipes. They spend ten more minutes down there in silence while she chews her lips and glances back at the paint splatter on the window. They go back upstairs and he tests the water, which now runs clear. She puts her hand in, grateful for the shower she’s about to take. She turns to thank him but he’s already lumbering back outside.

Once in the shower, she closes her eyes, focusing on the hot water running over her skin. She transports herself back into her tiny apartment and imagines she’s listening to the TV chatter she uses to keep herself company. She wants to be home. She wants to call Everett and quit her job, to be anywhere but here. Despite what she wants, she’s here, alone, suspended in the yearning of a rhythm that has not yet resumed, listening for words that have yet to be spoken.

She walks out of the en suite bathroom to change into something that wasn’t her road clothes, which always leaves her feeling vaguely grimy. As the t-shirt comes down over her head, she sees a shadow move under the door. It’s so fleeting that she almost convinces herself that she didn’t actually see it, telling herself that it was the fabric moving past her eye. She pops in her earbuds and puts on a forgettable audiobook while she tidies the room.

She hasn’t eaten since seven this morning and her stomach is clawing at her. She remembers the soup in the fridge. Once everything is organized, she goes to the door and her hand rests on the knob, unmoving. The audiobook continues playing but the words become a warbling mono-voice.

The kitchen is a room with a fridge and a stove and a sink. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a room.

While tied to a chair, Mary-Ruth Ahler’s head was crudely sawn off with an unidentified object, according to the recently released coroner’s report. Police say—

It is like any other room in the house.

they’re still searching for her hands.

Just a room.

She’s assaulted with an instant surge of darkness and her naked feet are displaced onto cold linoleum. Did she black out?

The fridge hums. The crickets and the howling dogs are gone. A dim glow arrives through the sink window, the motion lights tripped by something unknown. The standstill holds her in a crushing grip, its insidious fingers gripping every atom of the room. All is suspended in liminal catatonia.

In the doorway, a bleach-white face is vivid against the oblivion behind it.

The eldest son, Cy Ahler,

Vacant, expressionless.

Says that he doesn’t remember a thing.

The black stone eyes are on her, their focus unrelenting. She tastes acid and copper.

The rest of his body oozes around the corner, clothed in black. He takes a languid step toward her and, in tandem with his movements, her shaking limbs find the will to withdraw. Their mutual gaze is deadlocked. Specks of darkness float across their faces as a flock of crows outside flies away.

He reveals a severe smile and the floodlights fade into the pervasive vacuum of night. Her shallow panting is the sole sound. She knows this room. There are three doors. One to the dining room, another to the main hallway and one behind her that leads to the laundry room and the backyard beyond. She’s taken this path hundreds of times and her memory of it is fresh. She turns, her fingers skittering across the wall for the knob that has always been there. Now it isn’t.

Behind her, feet pound into the floor. She runs toward the hallway, feet slipping under her and her knee almost brushes the linoleum. She collides with the solid wood and stumbles forward, grabbing the knob to catch herself and slamming the door shut behind her. She wrenches the brass baseboard slide-lock into place and scrambles to her feet.

The door savagely convulses. She fears it might come open but he abruptly abandons it. A feral rampage sounds as he doubles back toward the dining room. She darts down the hall as the sharp crack of plaster tells her—she launches herself across the threshold of another room, slamming the door shut as the onslaught thrashes down the hallway. He’s so loud, she thinks maybe he didn’t hear the door close. On her knees, she fumbles with the pathetic turn-lock on the knob but it’s sticky from under-use. Finally, the lock slides into place. She winces at the sound.

His footfalls stop at the door and she swallows a rising sob. Her vision is vibrating as she scans the walls and floors, realizing for the first time that she’s in a bathroom. There are no windows other than a small one above the tub that almost touches the ceiling. A pair of iron fists suddenly start beating at the door, making it crackle like fire against the frame. She tears open the under-sink cupboard and spots a spray bottle labeled ‘bleach’ in letters so big she can see them even in the semi-darkness. She snaps it up and twists the cap to the ‘on’ position, gets to her feet and presses her back to the wall next to the door hinges.

The pounding stops and her ears ring in the abrupt silence. She grips the spray nozzle like a pistol trigger and she waits. And waits. The lock disengages and the door gently swings open. She holds the bottle at face level, arms straight out.

“Alayna?” Cy asks. His voice is steady and dispassionate; he isn’t breathing hard. Her grip softens on the nozzle but she doesn’t lower it. “I saw you come in here. Are you okay?” he asks. His shoes scuff the floor tiles as he walks in and she watches the shadow of his head turn left and right. He peers behind the door and lets out a small and tittering laugh, jokingly putting his hands up. He takes a step back. “What are you doing?” he asks, eyes sweeping over her in rapid appraisal.

“You saw me come in here?” she asks, her voice quieter than she intends. His scrutinizing gaze softens. Her back hits the wall as he steps forward.

Her eye travels the black horizon that cuts his face in half, wondering what, if anything, is withheld behind the veil of unlit space. “Are you okay?” he asks. His tone is a deliberate, careful appeasement. A lie. She feels so alone in this moment. Directionless. She chooses to believe that she blacked out, that everything she saw only a minute ago was a fucked-up dream or hallucination. He takes a mindful step toward her and she can smell the rain in his hair. “Alayna, did something happen?”

She’s drunk with exhaustion, so Cy carries her into the guest bedroom. While she lies in bed, he brings in a bowl of the pork and mushroom soup Ed left in the fridge and tells her to eat whatever she’d like. She takes infrequent, nibbling bites of it but mostly drinks the salty broth. He turns off the lights and turns on reruns of Forensic Files, which they used to watch in this exact room while their parents talked on the backyard patio, smoking and drinking. The narrator’s familiar voice is like a warm shower on a cold day. Cy takes off his shoes, puts his feet under the blankets and lies next to her, face perched atop the heel of his hand as he watches the show and pets her hair. She starts to cry. It takes him a moment to notice but then he says “Hey, hey. What’s wrong?” and his hand strokes her arm. “Do you—” she says, trying to fight the sob that’s rolling up her throat. She rubs her eyes until it hurts. He waits in patient silence and she looks over at him, snuffling and wiping her face. “Please tell me it wasn’t you,” she says, feeling like a small child asking their mother to look under their bed. “What?” he asks, unfurling a placating smile. “Of course it wasn’t.” She turns and wraps her arms around his neck. The ebb and swell of his cool breath, the sunstruck warmth of his skin, his broad and sprawling arms; all of it encloses her in the walls of a family she has finally returned to, where gasping sobs shiver through her in rolling tides, building into a full-body ache. He draws her in tighter and tighter and it doesn’t matter that it hurts.

Her eyes flutter and the TV is off. Moonlight glistens against bare walls that are stripped of furniture. Her breath accelerates. She attempts to sit up but she’s tethered to the bed. “Cy,” she manages to whisper. “Are you here?” She pulls at the cord tied around her wrists, the plastic cinching and clinging to her skin. Her head jerks left and right, searching for anything familiar. She recognizes the head and footboard of the bed, the texture of the carpet, the pond in the window. This is the same room; she is definitely still in the house. His laugh startles her and she immobilizes like ensnared prey. He’s standing in the doorway to the bedroom and the hallway light radiates behind him like the fire of heaven shining into this freezing abyss. He looks down at her bare skin and she follows his gaze to find herself drenched in water, her skin tight around swelling limbs and coming apart at the newly healed scars running up her arms. His eyes move beyond her into the space next to the bed and cold breath caresses her neck.

He steps back and shuts the door to Everett’s office. “Why haven’t you brought this to me before now?