After she died I heard her voice. At first I did not know the voice was hers, detecting only a murmur in another room. In my kitchen I stood at the sink, scrubbing a pan crusted over with the remnants of a meal I’d spent hours preparing. The casserole had turned out poorly, my effort utterly wasted, and I reflected on the time required of me to make and clean up a meal that disgusted me. This is to say, my mind was on something else, and it spooked me to hear, from the other room, a familiar female voice that spoke in rambling, indeterminate words.
I had been haunted, tormented, by both the fact and the manner of her death. Not many septuagenarians can survive an impact with a moving car. Though my great aunt was in many ways formidable, here she proved no exception. I had recently moved to this city and everywhere saw ads for lawyers, primarily those who specialized in personal injury. The ads covered billboards and benches and buses, no mode of transportation safe from reminders of the perils of moving in public among other people. Was every city like this, or was this one uniquely home to millions predisposed to misadventure of all kinds? Lawyers, almost entirely men, promised to help, grinning with the same expression and vastly different degrees of beauty. I developed a crush on one toothy specimen in particular, dreaming at night of a broken leg or fractured rib that would compel me to visit his office. My crush distracted me from my grief, yet the other reminder ceaselessly trailed me: her, and now my, dog, Solomon.
When my great aunt Irma died, she left me nothing but an ancient and imperious creature named Solomon who squealed when left on his own. Otherwise, he sat beside me, alternately sleeping or peering from suspicious, failing eyes at a world that held little to interest him. We suspected him vaguely related to the chihuahua. Solomon had served as witness to my promise, ten years ago, to take on the responsibility of his care—“should I ever be unable to fulfill it,” as she had, at the time, ominously intoned. It was one of two things I promised to do for her. His shrewd eyes had seemed, then, to say that he would be sure to hold me to them, and now here he was to do so.
I had seen neither her nor him in years. Occasionally I regretted abandoning she who had raised me; mostly I rationalized it not as abandonment but as a forced separation—forced by life’s ever-proliferating, and ever-shifting, exigencies. School and work and so on—I lamented—led me away from her, though it is true that I rarely managed to push myself to make the trip to see her. I hoped she did not think too badly of her prodigal nephew—that she understood. Still, when the news came of her death, I went to the funeral and took on her dog, having driven the length of one night to retrieve him and ferry him back to my home.
When the voice came, I stood washing dishes, and Solomon was content enough in a playpen stuffed with pillows to keep him snug, secure, and silent. One hand gripped a baking dish and the other a sponge; I scrubbed to a backdrop of silence, save Solomon’s shifting, until the murmuring began. The utterance, issued from another room, sounded just like someone on the phone, audible but incomprehensible; but I had no roommates, and my home’s cement walls had not thus far permitted neighborly noises to penetrate them. I stopped and dropped the dish, stepping into the living room to listen. The voice was louder here, not quite distinct, and I stood, facing my threadbare, thrifted couch, and strained to hear it. The silent room and its cheap, ugly furniture chided me, and I told myself I ought to get us both ready for bed.
But then the voice came again. It came from within my apartment, I was certain, and I paced the room until I ascertained its source.
It seemed to be coming from the bedroom, and so I followed it there, down the hall.
My guess proved correct. My great aunt sat in the armchair in the corner.
She looked better than she had at the funeral: less pale and less caked in mortician’s makeup. She said, very clearly now, “Why don’t you put on the coffee? The coffee’s in the cupboard and the scoop’s right over there …” She continued to ramble about her morning, the paper she’d just finished reading and the gossip she’d heard from her neighbor. No break in her speech or physical movement indicated any awareness of me. I turned around and left.
In the kitchen, I returned to the baking dish and scrubbed it as best I could. Wet, it gleamed, and I put it on the dishrack to dry. Solomon continued to sleep.
I had to think what to do next. Encountering my aunt had, naturally, unnerved me, though it was not altogether unexpected. Had I not aimed for this outcome precisely? My retrieval of certain remnants of her—hair plucked from the brush in her bathroom, fingernails I found embedded in a plush bedroom carpet—had occupied the hours I spent in her home before carting Solomon and his things back to the city. Long days of starvation and nights of soothing Solomon to sleep before incanting strange words that felt thick and mealy and sour on my tongue had led me to hope for success in particular arcane matters. And they were, as it turned out, successful—the artifacts and incantations and rituals I had put myself through—and here was the fruit of my labor, babbling about god knows what. I did not know which god knew what and did not know what she knew; it seemed that some sort of confusion had taken hold of Aunt Irma, a side effect I was neither familiar with nor prepared for.
Of course, I did as I was told. The long hours of my youth had not been for naught. Necromancy is a difficult subject—and only one among many I studied—and I do not doubt that my deficiencies caused her, at times, to wish she had not taken on the burden of her orphaned nephew’s education. More than once, she surely wished she’d let me be, left me to my fate, perhaps even found another, cleverer child who would have taken to her teachings more quickly. Nonetheless, she stuck with me and taught me all she knew, and sometimes—especially when her neighbors complimented the kindly old woman they had long known her to be, who had taken on such a burden and so far into her life’s journey—she had a look on her face that anyone might have taken for pride, albeit restrained as was her wont. And when, on that day I so vividly recall, she sat me down near her altar and made me take a twofold vow, she even showed some satisfaction at how it all turned out. She smiled, and she looked truly happy.
We wandered through dark, fearsome regions together, and nobody knew. In repayment for the kindness she had shown me, I had sworn that, if anything were ever to happen to her, I would care for old Solomon and I would bring her back. And now here she was, none too keen post-resurrection; I reasoned it may have been some variety of sleeping-sickness that would gradually shake itself off.
The kitchen could not distract me further; duty and my regard for her—not to mention my fear—bade me return to the bedroom, where still she sat on the armchair and continued to talk. She said: “—and he was driving a little too fast and he actually hit me, he bumped the back of my car, when I was almost at the stop sign just a block from the store. It scared me to death, but I stopped and pulled over to the side of the road, and he pulled up behind me, and he got out of the car and slammed the door and stomped up to my window with his face as red as a cherry, and his fist smacked my window, and—” She was in the midst of recounting something I’d heard before, an incident from years ago. Still, she betrayed no recognition of me or where she was or even the fact that she was once again alive. She continued in this vein for some time. I sat on my bed and listened to the story, which gave way to a recitation of the things she needed to buy at the grocery store and the chores that needed doing in her home. She spoke for not more than one minute about wandering through a very long and very dark corridor or cavern, which piqued my interest, for I thought she might have approached a more pertinent subject—her death. She described what sounded like a corridor with length and width but no depth. Rather than yield further details, however, she plunged into her anxieties about Solomon’s health. For a few more minutes I listened, and then I stood up to take care of the dog, who had since woken up and begun to whine.
After taking him outside, I returned to the bedroom, where Solomon froze. He stared at his mistress, and then he looked at me. He once more looked at Irma and trotted her way. She failed to acknowledge him. I lifted him up and put him on her lap, and she continued to chatter all the while: “—came over the other day for coffee, and she looked as pale as—as pale as anything, like she’d seen a ghost or she was a ghost herself, white as a sheet. I let her in and she sat down and I poured her a cup and immediately she started to wail …” This story, I had to admit, was lost on me, but eventually a rupture in it occurred, for Irma began once more to describe the corridor and then to speak in a different tongue. These words resembled those I had uttered in the nights I devoted to her. I could not understand them, but to hear her speak frightened me as much as my own utterances had done. They caught in her throat—a violent sound—and then this part of her recitation ended, just as quickly as begun. She said, “The idea was to slowly and systematically destroy the structure.” Afterward, she turned to the subject of a trip to her general practitioner.
At this point, I had to take my leave of her. I tried to scoop up Solomon, who grunted in protest, and so I left them there and retreated to the couch. Sleep would not grant me solace, save a few snatches here and there, and I arose in the morning with eyes bloodshot and nerves frayed. Irma had put in a long night, for there she was, Solomon still curled on her lap—though not asleep—describing a pasta dish she’d made “the other night.” After she concluded a list of ingredients that included garlic, Parmigiano Reggiano, and artichoke hearts, she began to describe a vast being with countless eyes and wings made entirely of flesh, the flesh ragged and worn and bleeding here and there, “which descended upon me while I stood in the midst of the crowd, in the plain, in the gray plain in which we wandered, and though the sky had heretofore looked empty, nonetheless it soared down to meet us. Or rather, since we stood on a two-dimensional plane, it merely lowered itself and approached the widely distributed crowd that took up one large corner of the region. Its eyes were as tall as I am, and I could see the holes in its wings, as from combat …” Her tone was flat, as though describing another mundane incident or reading from a very dull book, but it had a sort of hypnotic effect on me. She proceeded to describe the creature that confronted “us”—this mysterious crowd to which she belonged—and ate one of them. She had not even noticed its mouth, yet it seized one of their number and throttled him with its powerful, fleshy wings, on the ends of which were prehensile digits, and the body vanished within the folds of the creature’s awful body, evidently consumed. The crowd dispersed; the people ran away, including Irma, who now, in my bedroom, very quickly lapsed into a description of the flowers in her garden. Her face and her voice remained the same all the while.
Only once did her voice vary in volume or pitch. It was a couple days later, when I sat in the living room watching the television with the sound turned up, hoping that the onscreen detectives would drown out her chatter. Suddenly, I heard her voice raised to a shout, saying “I! Remember! Everything!” She delivered each word with great force, as if hurtling a bomb. I ran to the room and found her the same as ever, face serene. Solomon looked startled.
There was no option but to take her at her word. Apparently, she remembered everything, and she would recite it until the end of the line. And who knows would come after that?
It seemed, therefore, that this was how things would be. Irma spoke—speaks—without cease. She does refuse my offers of food and drink but fails to regard them at all. Solomon sleeps on her lap, but she does not look at or touch him so far as I can tell; as for him, despite it all, he is delighted, content to remain in repose on her lap except when we attend to his few bodily necessities. She never moves from the armchair at all, and I have ceded the room entirely to her. What seems most remarkable to me is the fact that her voice has never faltered, never once grown hoarse. I permit her to continue, but what other choice do I have? My promise to her has been fulfilled. I mull over one day leaving the apartment and her behind, and I wonder whether she would notice if I simply let her go on exploring those depths on her own forever. But I have not yet made any moves to leave. The old loyalty cannot be so easily vanquished. We are wandering a new path, just as fearsome as any down which we have trod, and again it is the two of us together—the two of us and Solomon—and again nobody knows.
Daniel David Froid is a writer who lives in Arizona and has published fiction in The Masters Review, Lightspeed, Black Warrior Review, Post Road, and elsewhere.
Image: rd.com
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Heavy Feather Review 