THE HOUSE TO COME
David Hollander
Early morning, dense fog ignited by swiveling spotlights, their three sleek boats gliding into the glassy lagoon and then beached in deep sand, the smoky air pulsing in the swinging carousel of a single, noiseless siren. Half a dozen uniformed men spilled upon the shore, their Captain holding the map pencil-drawn on lined yellow paper, belts dangling multifarious weaponry, black guns and blackjacks. Departmental windbreakers unzipped as they toil up through the sand and empty themselves upon the paved Island Loop, their boots clopping on asphalt and not a word uttered between them, and then off the road again, through pockets of warm air and damp haze. They trek across fields dotted with lonely ruminants chewing cud, black-spotted cows with immense and liquid brown eyes, or horses in half-dead timeless stupor, their breath expelled in twin jets of vapor. They push on through an ancient cemetery, its headstones dissolving like sugar gumdrops exposed to rain, and then down they go the overgrown declivity from which they can see the house itself which indeed exists exactly as he promised. A nondescript clapboard affair tucked within the seam of a high, red-clay bluff, the white paint chipped and fissured, the dwelling an ivory tumor metastasized from some germ of evil latent within the bluff itself. Guns drawn now and under the direction of their Captain they spread out and approach, rousing a Great Blue Heron from a nameless state of reverie, graceful wings unfurled and thumping through the fog, its black eyes devoid of even the possibility of affection and the Captain now pushing through the front door, the morning silent and dysthymic—they have stepped sideways into their own rusted nightmares—and the interior of the house exactly as foretold: Dusty realm of disrepair, splintered pine floors soft with rot, the hollow echo of water dripping, the police Captain fighting the urge to unload his weapon upon the house itself, upon its crumbling wallpaper and pale wooden chairs, its damp plaster and cadaverous rot.
In the kitchen they discover the instruments: A thick leather strap stained and striated; a rusting cleaver; a hacksaw with several teeth missing. And although there is no physical evidence of his self-described antics, no smattering of carnage, they feel nevertheless as if the butchery were itself personified and lurking within this small pantry, invisible but breathing the same breath as they. An officer reaches into the stainless steel sink, pinches the torn end of a rag stuffed into the sink’s mouth and begins to draw it outward, a hackneyed magician’s routine as the rag keeps on coming, a long thin strip of discolored cotton (perhaps the selvage of a bedsheet), and then there are three feet of it dangling like an eel from the officer’s hands and when the last of it is withdrawn there is a soft hiss and the kitchen fills instantly with a foul odor, pungent and sickly-sweet, effluvium of salt and honey. The Captain gags reflexively, and they stare together into the black mouth at the bottom of the sink as if expecting the emergence of a vindictive djinn. One among them lifts the hacksaw, entranced, and the Captain scolds him firmly. “You should all know better. No handling of the evidence without proper materials and protocol. This is no different from anything else . . .” A huge iron pot sits upon the gas stove’s large front burner, covered.
A shout from the back of the house, where there is a porch and then a small yard abutting the wall of the bluff, such that a reveler upon this porch would stare into nothing but the earth twenty feet distant climbing vertically and then vanishing into smoke. Two of their regiment are there at the base of the wall. One hunched over, vomiting a delicate festoon of yellow bile into the dense colorless fog. The other stands above the newspaper—they’ve unfolded one bundle, while the other two lie folded up neat and tight, the same way one might package a fish bought at market— and at the center of this paper frame is a collection of parts, indefinable at first, a sampling of blood and offal, red and white, a confectioner’s holiday palette. But the Captain stares long enough to discern more. Pink thumblike parcel beside the shriveled scrotum and the testes like almonds, raspberry viscera flecked with loose chips of bone and now the Captain turning and spilling his own belly’s lurid acid there at the foot of the bluff. His head lowered, retching in the silence, his eye landing upon a steel bucket overturned and coated in a black syrup. The pattern of that dark stain will imprint itself forever upon his memory, the silvery bucket in the dirt and the parabolas of young blood like inverted hills upon its surface.