For twenty-five years Carroll Robinson opened Sherman Brothers Bank every morning at eight o’clock. He woke up beside his wife Donna to hum of the same alarm, slipping from the bed and into the bathroom, readying himself to shower, shave and dress for work. Breakfast was on the table by six-thirty, Donna murmuring AM radio songs in the kitchen while she cooked. Carroll read the paper over toast, eggs and coffee with cream. At seven-thirty he took his coat up from the rack at the door and gave Donna a kiss on the cheek, bending to meet her and wish her a good day. Donna always smiled.
Carroll drove his black sedan down Mooreland Street every Monday-through-Friday since he was twenty-nine, and still firm from his varsity days at Middleton University. A graying mustache now disguised the thinness of his upper lip, with a receding head of fine fawn-colored hair. Blue dress shirts and brown slacks and jackets covered up his sloping shoulders and crooked posture. His sons Chris and Jake had gone off to Middleton U to follow in his footsteps. Chris was tall and tanned with their mother’s gentle disposition, Jake an athlete with broad shoulders and hands, as his father had been in youth. Phone-calls and pride bridged the void left by empty bedrooms.
The Monday in question had drifted by on lazy feet, punctuated by the cold ticking of the wall clock above Carroll’s desk. It had been an uncommonly slow day at the bank. For this reason Carroll kept his office door shut that afternoon. He had no clients to meet with, tending instead to the stack of forms Mrs. Dawes had left on his desk after retrieving her morning coffee from the break room. Listening for the thin arms of his silver clock he checked, re-checked and signed the day’s lending proposals and mortgage inquiries, marking the liquid crawl of time in coffee breaks, lunch breaks, forms filed and put up. Carroll sat at his desk and simply breathed. At six o’clock Sherman Brothers Bank closed and locked its doors for the day. The rest of the bank’s staff had finished their duties and left for the day, climbing into their cars and leaving the parking lot in a single filing of vehicles. Carroll checked and re-checked the locks and security system at six-forty; satisfied he crossed the small lot to his car and made his way to Mooreland Street.
The neighborhood was black by the time Carroll rounded the last corner on his way home. It had fallen asleep under the broad arm of autumn, shortening the days and laying waste to the shrubbery and broad trees that shadowed homes and doorsteps. The wide street was lit by the spark of staggered lampposts, casting fat pools of light across the ground where Carroll’s headlights fell short in leading him to his driveway. To home, a good meal and a beer while he watched the evening news with Donna, as he had every night for twenty-eight years.
Lazy from the day’s slowness, his eyes drifted across the width of his windshield to the shadows of naked trees and fat two-story houses in his peripheral vision. It was then that Carroll noticed the girl on the other side of the street, outside of 6621, a squat one-story with two trees in the yard. At the end of the driveway, under a pool of lamplight, the girl stood. She was a silhouette in the drape of a white dress, at Chris’s age of nineteen, cut in long limbs and tumbling red curls. Her face was rounded out by soft features and high cheekbones jutting under her large eyes. They were hollow-looking beneath the pool of shadows gathering there from the downward cant of her head, empty like the sockets of a skull, their color undeterminable in the dark.
She was familiar to him, like an old photograph or the distant tinkling of piano keys from another room. It wasn’t intimate knowledge but gentle association, making his fingers itch with the strange hum of déjà vu. Carroll saw her in passing, lit in his headlights like a stripe of lightening. He hadn’t meant to but he stared, craning his neck to meet her eyes, black and then gold in the distance between them as he drove away. Straightening in his seat, tension swelled in his stomach as he watched the girl in his rearview mirror, under the halo of her dingy spotlight, melting into the street as she faded from view. Carroll swallowed on the thick knot that had gathered his throat, took a breath, and held it.
He wouldn’t tell Donna of this over dinner, or while they watched the evening news together on the sofa, his wife’s fingers finding his in a loose squeeze. Carroll would drink one beer, smile lazily under his grayed mustache before kissing Donna on the forehead and telling her it was time for bed. He wouldn’t think of girls on street corners, or so he promised himself as he crawled under the sheets to sleep.
***
Carroll went to work the next morning, and every morning until the Saturday. Each night he forced his eyes on the road, refusing the temptation to glance into his rearview mirror as he passed 6621 Mooreland Street. On Saturday he tended to the lawn with the riding mower he had received on Father’s Day. Donna put on her broad-brimmed straw hat and hummed quietly to herself, sitting on her knees in the grass and plucking weeds from the flowerbeds. She cooked brisket that night and talked to Jake on the phone in the kitchen while Carroll watched football in the living room, a slowly warming beer in hand. On Sunday they went to church and sang hymns. Donna held his hand and smiled like a woman who loved her husband should.
In the car on the way home, his hands gripped the steering wheel lazily at ten and two, Donna beside him. The sunshine coming through the windshield made the fading highlights in her brown hair appear golden as she listed recipes for dinner. Jake was coming home with a girl named Deborah that he wanted them to meet. She was pretty and she was smart and she could be the one, Donna smiled. Carroll nodded in turn, staring out the window at the old house on Mooreland Street and down its empty driveway.
The house at 6621 had been long abandoned. The crooked For Sale sign staked into the grass by the mailbox was bleached by the sun, the fat black typeface faded gray. The house itself sighed behind it, tired from disuse and obscured by the green overgrowth and knotted clusters flytraps that had overrun the yard in wide, smiling mouths. It was a fat white structure with cracked siding, worn window shutters and paint peeled by long summers and storms. The trees in the yard waved at him drowsily in the midday breeze, as though in invitation, beckoning Carroll to stop the car and head up the narrow footpath amid the twisting weeds.
For a moment Carroll contemplated it, as Donna rambled softly at his side, to walk to the front door and step inside the old house. He didn’t look into his rearview mirror as he passed 6621. If he had he might have seen the girl, a white sliver draped in red hair. That night Carroll had dinner with his wife, his son and his son’s new girlfriend. He said Grace at the table while his family held hands and never spoke a word of the girl.
***
Monday limped by Carroll’s desk, dragging itself in an unnatural lurch of time from his office, down the hallway to the lobby of the bank. He spoke to no one, save Mr. Bradley from the barber shop when he stopped by to ask about the interest rate on his business loan, and Mrs. Dawes. She had peered inside his office, twice knocked softly on the door and asked Carroll if he wanted to join her for lunch at the deli down the street. Indicating to his brown bag lunch of Sunday’s leftover roast beef and broccoli, Carroll smiled gently and thanked her anyway. At seven-forty-seven Mooreland Street was dark and empty, save the flutter of moths around the bulbs of street lamps. Six blocks from home Carroll heard the jarring thump of a flat front right tire. He cursed softly under his breath, pulling to the gutter where he put on her emergency blinkers and got out of the car. The tire was flattened to the pavement, shrugging itself from the hubcap when he kicked it uselessly with the toe of his polished black wing-tip.
He popped open the trunk to retrieve the spare, scissor-jack and tire iron. Hitching up his slacks, he lowered himself to the ground with the dull popping of three vertebrae to set up the jack. Oil smudged the knee of his pants, but it was the flicker of light from across the street that captured Carroll’s attention. It came from over his shoulder and his vision followed the line it made, over a pool of light fanning out across the grimy concrete from the intermittent flash of a street lamp. Beneath it stood the girl. It took Carroll’s eyes a moment to adjust before he could make out the familiar roundness of her face, the blackness of her eyes. Above her insects wildly swooped and dove about in flutters of shadow, attracted to the lamp’s blinking spark.
The girl looked at Carroll, saying nothing. His throat felt tight as he knelt before his wheel well, craning his neck to stare at her from over his shoulder. His hands rested on the scissor-jack that he had abandoned in favor of watching the way her hair looked under dirty light, the metal growing warm under his palms. Slowly he stood and turned to meet her.
“Hello.” Beneath his mustache Carroll’s mouth curved gently. He wiped his hands off on the thighs of his slacks, as though they were already dirty. “Do you live around here?”
At this distance Carroll could make out the gentle slope of her small nose, her full cheeks dusted with freckles. He swallowed, mouth dry as he purposelessly inspected the drape of her dress, the way it hung from her shoulders, swallowing her frame inside its folds. The neckline curled under her clavicle, dipping to emphasize the fullness of her breasts beneath the bodice, freckled as they were.
“It’s getting cold out,” he offered reflexively, voice waning behind his teeth and falsely paternal to his ears. “You should probably start heading home now, before you catch a chill.”
Without response the girl took careful steps forward, moving out from beneath the spotlight that had appeared to cage her. The bottom of her dress followed over the sounds of her bare footsteps, softly and like the rustle of leaves in the now barren trees. Carroll sucked in a breath between his teeth and she tipped her chin up to meet his stare. In person she was a full head shorter than Carroll and eyes the color of old dish water. She looked up at him so calmly, her face smooth in invitation, as to cause Carroll’s pulse to jump treacherously.
“You should go,” Carroll said again, firmer this time, but still betrayed by the dryness of his throat. “Somebody’s probably looking for you.”
She gave no response but for two slow blinks. A sudden bobble of light from the other end of the street caught Carroll’s eye. Another car approached them, its headlights focusing into twin orange beams. Carroll stepped away quickly, turning his back to the girl as though ashamed, stooping again to begin changing his forgotten tire. Behind him the gentle creak of the car’s suspension made him flinch, stupidly and against his better judgment, busying himself with the jack. Once the car had rolled passed them Carroll looked over his shoulder to see the girl still standing there, watching him, eyes warm on his back. Shaking his head, he unscrewed the bolts and exchanged his flat for the spare tire.
“Don’t just stand there.” Carroll couldn’t help the accusatory tone his voice had taken, the fatherly reprimand making him uneasy. “You’re going to get run over like that, standing in the street. Get home.”
He placed the old tire and all his tools into the trunk and closed it; saying nothing else he got into his car. He hadn’t needed to glance over his shoulder to feel her eyes on him still, staring holes into his back, through his shirt and between the buttons. Turning the key in the ignition he drove away without another look. In the safety of his own driveway, the flood light above the garage warmed the hood of his car as Carroll sat in his seat. Donna was home; her silhouette moved across the curtained living room window, a dim flutter of motion against the muted glow of lamplight. He watched her for a moment, and held a guilty breath behind his teeth as he thought of red ringlets and empty eyes.
***
For two days, Carroll did his best not to think of the girl or the old house. He said nothing to Donna, who remained unaware of the way the girl’s freckled breasts looked under the blush of headlights and lampposts. He couldn’t mention dreaming about them, as he had begun to, sweat-warmed, and heaving beneath the bodice of her dress as he thrust between her thighs. At the bank Carroll kept his office door shut to everyone but his appointments. He checked and signed paperwork quickly, and took his lunch alone, no matter what Mrs. Dawes offered. He wouldn’t be coaxed out, because if he did leave his office he saw the girl.
She stood on the sidewalk outside the bank, staring at him through the pristine glass double-doors. The short shrubs edging the parking lot swayed gently, their naked limbs moving to the whispering breeze but even for it she remained still. She watched him, fixated on him, on his skin through his jacket, shirt and pants, leaving Carroll bare under her eyes. It was impossible to resist becoming aroused by the sickness of it, the thrill of her eyes on him. The shame fell away the same way Donna’s face slipped from his mind under the thrum of his pulse, and so he locked himself in his office, and said nothing of it to anyone.
After work each night he drove home and saw the girl outside the abandoned house, beckoning him closer. Her name was written on the wind that never stirred her from her stillness, blowing between his fingers and out of his reach. Their common history slept in the folds of her dress, hiding in the softness of her skin and the curves of her hips and thighs. Each night Carroll ate dinner with his wife, watched the news and went to bed silently, and made sure Donna suspected nothing.
When he slept he dreamt of the girl, naked and spread across the overgrowth of the old house. He dreamt of dirt on her knees and elbows, making a mess of her perfect skin, her face flush with heat and salt. Flytraps and brushwood snared in the tidy ringlets of her hair, pulling at it like gnarled fingers as she twisted beneath Carroll, nails biting into his skin, pushing him away as he took her in the grass and the wild flowers in a vicious revolution of his hips. In the morning Carroll awoke five minutes before his alarm clock sounded, careful not to wake Donna as he slipped from the bed and into the bathroom. Looking into the mirror, Carroll stared at his reflection and no longer recognized the face that met him.
***
Carroll didn’t wait for Saturday to begin searching. After dinner on Thursday he lingered in the living room as Donna went to bed, assuring her with a pat on the wrist that he would soon follow. Once he heard the bedroom door swing closed upstairs, he plucked up a heavy stack of photo albums and yearbooks, their thick hardbound covers faded by time and dust. Carroll laid each one open on the kitchen table, running his dry hands on his pant legs as though to wipe them clean. He was careful not to leave creases their fabric binding or smudges on their pages, casting a glance over his shoulder towards the kitchen doorway as though the act was an admission of a crime.
Carroll searched through snapshots of his varsity days, baby pictures, Thanksgiving dinners and school productions for freckled features and red curls. Quickly flipping pages he scanned through his four years of high school and then the four at college, documented in grainy photos of smiling faces and school functions, looking for a name to pin the softness of thighs around his hips and the scratches that still burned under his shirt when he awoke. In his freshman year at Middleton U, sandwiched between the Geology Association and the campus marching band, Carroll Robinson found Claire Mosley. She was young and beautiful, just as she had been in his dreams and on the street at night, a curly-haired slip of a girl in a blouse and dark sweater. A dusting of freckles climbed her neck, over her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, her face round and hollow in the eyes. Carroll caught a breath between his teeth and felt himself shake somewhere in the veins of his forearms and the pit of his stomach.
In 1974 Carroll was eighteen, clean-shaven and broad in the shoulders. Claire was the lovely girl in his English class, with long legs under peasant skirts. She sat in the front row behind a pile of books, to the right Professor Timmins’s desk every morning when class began. Claire never spoke to Carroll but smiled at him on occasion, glancing at him from over her shoulder as he leaned over his desk and watched her. Carroll’s high school girlfriend Cassie didn’t follow him to college, staying behind to pursue teaching at a little school back home. Cassie didn’t have Claire’s long hair and soft skin. She was a short blonde thing with brown eyes, a wide smile and crooked bottom teeth, incapable of arousing Carroll beyond cursory kisses and quick, mechanical sex. Cassie didn’t know about Claire or the way that Carroll watched her, walking down the hallway between classes or to her car at night, calling out to him in soft curls and the flutter of crimped lashes from the sidewalk and across crowded rooms.
Donna would sleep well that night, content in their marriage bed. Carroll hid downstairs hunched over the kitchen table, staring at the face in his dreams. Through the kitchen window the Thompsons’ back porch light flickered from behind the privacy fence, but Carroll refused to look.
***
On Sunday morning, Carroll went to church. He looked at no one, keeping his eyes to the floor and the tips of his polished shoes, even as Donna reached for his hand and hummed to hymns, and Father Mike recited scripture behind a forgiving smile. At home he avoided her gaze, and while Donna ran her afternoon errands he stayed in, closed the curtains and stared at Claire Mosley.
There was a party the week before the final exams; Carroll could see it behind his eyes. It was held on the North Quad by the men’s dormitory, with hot dogs on barbeque grills, canned beers chilling in portable coolers and lazy dancing beneath crisscrossing strings of lights. Carroll had seen Claire across the courtyard, talking to a girl from his algebra class, holding a beer. She smiled in a quick flash of teeth and Carroll felt hot all over. He downed his beer to bolster his nerve and approached her carefully, in time for the friend to take the hint and usher herself away. He told Claire about football and economics, the only two things he was any good at; she smiled and listened, fingering a long curl as she politely sipped her beer. Carroll didn’t think at all about Cassie, or clumsy high school fumbling in the backseat of his father’s Chevy.
Claire led him from the party, saying that she wanted to get away from the noise. He followed her through the dark, feet carrying him expectantly to a grassy dip in the earth behind the gym, shaded by a group of huddling trees. Settling in the grass on her knees, Claire smiled at him. Carroll could see Claire’s legs under her skirt, the softness of her thighs, freckled like her breasts above the neckline of her top. He kissed her without warning and she let out a small embarrassed laugh. When she didn’t stop him Carroll kissed her again, pressing her back into the grass as he moved to push up her skirt and lay between her legs. Claire’s panties were warm, gently wet by sweat and skin as he ran a thumb along the defining crease, making her whimper into his lips and push against his shoulder.
“No,” she said softly, voice shaking under a damp breath, “No, we need to stop.”
The wetness on his thumb said something else. He opened his pants and licking her neck Carroll told her, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” as he slid down her panties and pushed inside of her. He took her until she cried, blades of grass sticking in her hair and to her sweaty skin, tears staining his shoulder when he finally finished in a shudder.
“I like you,” Carroll said, and wiped the tears from her cheeks and tried to kiss her again. Shoving him away Claire pulled her skirt down, shoulders still shaking. Quickly she disappeared into the knot of trees on stumbling feet, from the party and from English class. At his kitchen table at fifty-four, Carroll closed his eyes.
***
Carroll spent Monday afternoon behind his locked office door. There were two Claire Mosleys in the phonebook. He checked that morning, taking out the directory while Donna cooked breakfast and hid in the living room to look for Claire’s number and address. Carroll didn’t call either of them, his heart thumping darkly in his chest as he traced each number with the edge of a fingernail before slapping the book shut again. Once at the bank he told Mrs. Dawes that he wouldn’t be seeing any clients today, took up the stack of papers she held for him and forgot to thank her.
At his desk, he stared at his computer. His fingers itched above the keys in the cold thrum of fear, swallowing thickly and opening the internet browser. Searching Claire’s name yielded a page of results. Carroll scrolled through them quickly before finding her name attached to a link at the Middle U class of 1978 reunion website, and to that, a photograph that appeared in another window. Carroll flinched but still clicked, finding a middle-aged woman with dulled red hair, creases the corners of her eyes and mouth. Claire Mosley was now Claire Andrews, a marketing executive with a husband named Jim and two children, Pam and Dave.
She smiled in a grainy color photo, just as she had when she was eighteen. It was colder now but still the same smile that Carroll remembered, older than the face that now followed him, down the street, to the bank and home again. Whoever the Claire was that appeared outside of the old house on Mooreland Street, she was something separate, an illusion or phantom appendage that served to beckon him nearer to itself. For it Carroll felt sick, tight and terrible in his chest, and stayed in his office until six o’clock.
***
Carroll didn’t return home that night. He slowed his car outside of the old house and parked it. Through the naked sway of spindly trees the house called him. The girl with Claire’s face stared from under her spotlight, unmoving and unchanged, urging him to get out and travel to her. Holding a breath Carroll slipped out his car and followed in slow but determined steps, hands making fists at his side as he tipped his head down to meet her colorless eyes.
“You’re not Claire Mosley,” he told her, voice purposefully resolute, and gripped her by the arms. “I’ve looked her up. How can you have her face?”
The girl gave no response except to lift her arms and place her hands on his chest. She ran her blunt nails over the buttons of his collar and along the line of his neck. Carroll clenched his jaw and squeezed her arms, while she simply tipped her chin and stared at him with a reverence that Claire Mosley never held for him, opening her mouth to his. Carroll’s heart thumped heavily in his chest when he felt the press of her lips, wet and clumsy, mimicking the gentle intimacy of lovers. She made a sound low in her throat, some damp and primal noise. It reverberated from her body and into Carroll’s through their fingertips and the rustle of their clothing when she gripped him by the neck and kissed him.
A hot and possessive current slipped down Carroll’s back, hateful and desirous in his own jealous betrayal of Donna and of Claire’s long faded memory. Carroll was eighteen again, and Claire was no longer saying no, playing coy in that little smile, skirt and blouse. She had begged for it even then, with her eyes and her body, whether or not she had said so because he knew better. He had always known.
The sudden press of a hand at his shoulder dislodged Carroll’s grip. She wriggled free of his hold, a twirl of red and white as she turned and fled their spotlight for the driveway, the sidewalk and finally the front door of the house. Carroll followed, cursing under his breath as he ran towards the door, creaking open then shut as she disappeared past it and into the twilight. The house was cold when Carroll stepped inside the living room, black save the bleed of streetlight coming through bare windows, decaying in its neglect. Once his eyes focused he made out the familiar shapes of walls and doorways, the carpets brown with dust and trash from moving boxes, patterned wallpaper sagged at the corners and curled at the floorboards. Without occupants the house had rotted away, and Carroll felt himself made dizzy by the heavy smell of dirt and mold, climbing into his mouth and down into his lungs. He took cautious steps forward, breathing through the wrist of his shirt, and searched for the girl.
The patter of bare feet echoed in footfalls that shook dust from ceiling fixtures and made the walls sigh as though alive. Following the shudder of her footsteps he travelled cautiously down the unlit hallway, into the kitchen, beyond the rotting island counters and musty open refrigerator. The light of the next door neighbor’s back porch fixture bled into the window above the sink, carving a path to the backdoor, its small grimy window and the yard that expanded into the night outside. She waited as Carroll pulled open the door and stalked outside, across the lawn to grip her throat and jaw.
“I never hurt you.” Carroll tangled a hand in her hair, giving the girl’s head a shake. “I loved you, and you wanted it, I know you did.”
With a shove he forced her to the ground. Carroll opened his pants with thick and trembling fingers, dropping to his knees in the grass. He pushed her legs apart as she lay still beneath him, doll-loose and compliant. Carroll gripped her by the hip and thrust inside of her roughly, in a way he never dared to touch Donna, or even Cassie. He took his pleasure from her as she lay still; wanting and spread open across the brush and knotted flytraps that snared at her with toothed mouths. For it Carroll smiled.
Under hooded eyes he didn’t see the girl’s chest begin to open. It was the sounds of tearing stitches that first alarmed Carroll, but his brain was fogged with sex, muscles slowed by the weight of pleasure. He didn’t see the bodice of her dress rip as though cut down the middle, unwrapping in strips of fabric as the skin of her ribcage began to expand and then finally release. First the fat opened, then the muscle, ligament and bone in heavy wet snapping sounds, unfurling into the jaws that made up a second mouth, her chest an empty cavity. Inside the girl was a void and at its center a throat, her maws lined by teeth constructed of bowed and crooked bones. It must have been some trick of moonlight or a misfiring of Carroll’s imagination, but for a moment she looked pleased.
Carroll pulled away, scrambling back across the ground with kicking legs, fingers grasping at handfuls grass for purchase. The girl stared at up him from the ground with dead eyes, a loose sprawl of limbs that housed the toothy mouth, all gnashing bones and wet musculature. He put his hands up to defend himself but there was no time to fight her as she swallowed him whole, snapped up by the jaws, twisting and kicking as he slid down her gullet in a scream. Behind him the mouth shut, maws folding together like clasping fingers or prison bars, the juice from her stomach dribbling from the makeshift mouth in satisfaction. From her belly Carroll shouted through the bones and teeth, scratching uselessly at the meat of his cage with the edges of his fingernails, alone in her belly, but no one heard.
In the grass beneath the moonlight, the girl with Claire Mosley’s face lay in her bed of flytraps and slept as the empty house did.
First featured in M is for Monster, October 2010.
