Night Screams
By Sean Baron
“Down in the Dirt” writing
Mark opened his eyes and listened.
Someone in the house was screaming.
Someone else was beating on his bedroom door.
He glanced at the alarm clock he kept next to his bed and saw that it was flashing twelve o’clock over and over again in bright amber digits. The power must have gone out again, and he knew at once that Jenna had blown a fuse.
She was always doing that, plugging too many things into the bathroom outlet at one time while she got ready to go out for the night. It was an old house, built long before things like electric hair dryers and curling irons were even thought of and you just couldn’t overload the circuit like that. If you did, you’d find yourself creeping down into the dark basement hoping there was still a good fuse left in the little yellow box his father had kept on top of the electrical panel.
With the power out, Mark’s mother had probably blown her own fuse, especially if she was watching Carson at the time. Martha Jones loved Johnny Carson and she had spent every weeknight of the past fifteen years with him. It was, as far as Mark could tell, the longest lasting relationship she had ever had with a man.
He sighed heavily and sat up. Ignoring the scream was useless, and trying to sleep with that incessant banging on his door even more so. Sooner or later, whoever was knocking would get tired and just break the damn thing down. It was just a cheap door with a hollow center and the lock had been pried open by his mother and sister so many times that it barely held anymore.
He let his feet dangle off the edge of the bed for a moment while he scraped sleep out of his eyes and waited for his mind to clear. He had always been a heavy sleeper, and waking up was not something he could do quickly no matter what the circumstances. Sometimes he woke up not knowing who or where he was. Sometimes he woke up trembling and paranoid. Sometimes he woke up swinging.
As his eyes cleared, he reached for the reading lamp he kept on the nightstand and turned the knob. It was a dim light, no more than twenty five watts, but the light seared his eyes and he found himself squinting into the glare for several minutes until he was finally able to take in the familiar surroundings of his bedroom.
The room was small with just a few pieces of furniture; the bed, a desk, and a dresser. Several rows of paperback books lined some shelves he had hung in one corner and beneath them sat his comic books in four neatly stacked columns. Above the dresser, above everything in the room, hung the painting.
His eyes rested on the painting for a moment and then returned to his bookshelves, skimming over the titles. They had been shelved first by size, then alphabetically and not a single spine had been creased. His friends all said he was anal about the books, and though he wasn’t completely sure what that meant, he was pretty sure it was an insult. It didn’t matter what they thought though, he had always been meticulous about his books, and at times like these, looking at them soothed him somehow.
The neatly lined rows showed him that life could be structured and orderly, peaceful even. The books were proof that chaos didn’t have to be the rule rather than the exception. If that meant he was anal, fine, he could live with that. The screams coming through the thin wall seemed to argue against that line of thought though, and the constant banging on his door made it even harder to believe, but he knew it was true.
His eyes drifted past the shelves and then returned to the painting. He found no hope of peace in that particular work of art, no promise of structure. All he found on that black velvet canvas was a grim reminder of real life. His life anyway, where chaos was the rule, and until he was old enough to fend for himself in the world, he would just have to deal with it.
Where his mother had found the horrible thing and what had possessed her to buy it for him was a mystery, but it had hung on the wall since they had moved into the house in 1974. He was almost ten years old now, and though he had been forced to look at the awful thing for the past five years, he was still not used to it. He had tried to take it down several times in the past, but she kept hanging it back up. And each time he took it down, he was punished more severely for it. Worse than the punishment though, worse than any punishment, was her trying to rationalize it for him.
“Its art Mark,” She would say. “And someday you’ll appreciate it.” She said the same thing about the nude woman hanging in their living room. That was the painting all his friends wanted to come and see. No body ever wanted to come and look at the clown.
His sister’s voice, panicky and out of breath interrupted his thoughts. “Wake up Mark! Wake up!” She cried. “You have to call the police!”
“All right, all right, shut up already. I’m coming!” He shrieked. “Jesus H. Christ!” He knew immediately that he had been too harsh, and wished he could have taken back the words, or at least changed the tone of them. Laney was in the same boat he was in, and three years younger. She didn’t need him taking out his anger on her.
He stood up and unlocked the door, pausing briefly to look back at the clown hanging above his dresser. It was a sad clown, one badly in need of a shave and smoking a stubby little cigar. A single tear ran from each dark and hungry eye, and when his mother had hung it up, she had said it reminded her of Red Skelton. Mark didn’t know who Red Skelton was, but sometimes when he had trouble sleeping, he thought he could see the clown’s skull glowing red beneath the painted on frown and it scared him.
The painting had always scared him in fact. Something in those dark eyes was unsettling. Clowns were supposed to be fun. Clowns were supposed to be silly. There was nothing fun or silly about that clown. That clown looked like it wanted to eat Mark for breakfast.
“Art!” He scoffed, shaking his head. He pulled the door closed, deliberately harder than he needed to, hoping the damn thing would fall off the wall and shatter. That wouldn’t end it though, he knew that as well as he knew his own name. His mother would either reframe the black velvet, or have it sown into a pillow for him and that was something he would not be able to deal with. Sleeping under the thing was bad enough, but having to lay his head on it night after night? The thought made him cringe.
The bright light of the outer hall was harder for his eyes to adjust to. There were three small wall sconces in the hall, and his mother insisted on putting 100 watt bulbs in each of them. The hallway was short, only fifteen feet long, and the resulting glare was blinding.
He looked across the hall and saw Laney slinking silently back into her own room. “They’re going to kill each other.” She whispered and then quietly closed the door on him. He heard her sliding the bolt into place, the sound of it clicking shut saddened him. No one should have to live like this, he thought, having to lock your bedroom doors at night against your own mother. It was insane, yet it was how it had always been.
Mark paused at Laney’s door. “Good.” He answered, though he knew she was already back in her bed. “Maybe then we’ll get some sleep.”
Plastered on the outside of her door was a Woodsy the Owl sticker just above eye level. “Give a hoot,” It said. “Don’t Pollute” and it covered a splintered hole his mother had made with her fist the last time Laney had locked herself in. His eye lingered on the cartoon owl, not wanting to move the rest of the way down the hall. “You’re too late Woodsy,” He said to himself. “Shit flows down hill and our house is at the bottom of a valley.”
It was one of his father’s sayings and though he knew shit and pollution were not quite the same things, they were close enough. The sentiment was the same at least, and he thought his father would agree, were he still around. No one, his mother included or so she claimed, knew where Dennis Jones was. He supposedly went out for cigarettes one night and never came back. But Mark thought it sounded like a bad cliché. His father didn’t even smoke.
He turned right and continued down the hall to where the remaining two rooms of the house’s second floor sat across from each other. Both doors were open, the lights in each room on. The padlock to Jenna’s room lay on the floor in pieces, its clasp had been cut and it looked dead.
Maybe there was more here than just a blown fuse, Mark thought. He poked his head in to his mother’s room but didn’t dare enter. No one was allowed inside that room, and besides, the room was obviously empty. The bed was still made, and the television set on the bureau wasn’t even on.
He turned to Jenna’s door and froze. The window was open and the screen had been kicked out. The curtains blew inward like ghosts held down by invisible chains. They should be blowing outward, he thought. If he were those curtains, he would certainly be trying to leave the room.
His mother was straddling Jenna, struggling to hold her down, her face red with rage. There were veins standing out in her neck and temples as she pushed her weight down onto Jenna and she was sweating despite the cold air coming in through the open window. It was January and the temperature outside hadn’t been above ten degrees in the past two weeks.
Jenna lay on her back struggling. She was trying to fight back, but was at a disadvantage. Martha Jones was a big woman and Jenna was not strong enough to withstand the added weight on her chest. Plus, Mark saw that his mother was trying to stuff something into Jenna’s mouth, a rolled up sock or maybe a wash rag, making it hard for Jenna to breath. The sock was covered with blood.
“Don’t just stand there, help me!” His mother screamed.
Mark could only shake his head. Help you, he thought, help you what? Kill her?
“Mark, she’s biting me!”
“What do you want me to do?” Mark screamed. “I’m only nine!” The response seemed like a logical one, but as the words echoed in his mind he knew it had made no sense.
Martha Jones looked over at her only son, hatred growing in her eyes. “She won’t stop screaming Mark, and if she won’t stop screaming, I have to shut her up!”
Jenna took advantage of Mark’s distraction and twisted violently under his mother, sending the big woman rolling off of her and onto the floor. Jenna sprang to her feet and leaped head first through the open window. Both Mark and his mother reached for Jenna instinctively, but they were equally too slow. His mother, who was closer, brushed one of Jenna’s calves with her fingers, but Jenna was already gone. She hadn’t even screamed.
Mark had though. He had screamed as he reached for her and was still screaming. His outstretched hands had come nowhere near Jenna’s body, his fingers only grasped emptily at the space where his sister had been.
He stepped forward and leaned out of the open window still screaming and still reaching. Jenna had already landed and Mark was amazed at how quickly her body slammed into the ground. They were only two stories up, but Jenna had dropped like a stone, her head hitting the frozen ground almost as soon as her feet had cleared the window sill. He knew from her sprawled position on the ground, the way her legs were caught up in the branches of a small shrub beneath the window and the way her head was twisted on her neck, that she was already dead.
“Why didn’t you stop her Mark? She was biting me!” His mother turned him around and held out her hand for Mark to see. He glanced down briefly, but said nothing. There were small indentations from Jenna’s teeth just below the first knuckle of her first two fingers and a smear of blood on her hand but that had come from Jenna’s mouth. The skin on his mother’s fingers had not even been broken.
“Well, I hope the bleeding stops before the police get here. If they see that I’m bleeding, they’ll ask questions.” She said this in a calm, matter of fact tone of voice, as if nothing at all had happened. It appeared to Mark that this woman he had depended on for so much over the course of his life didn’t even seem to care that her own daughter had just plummeted to her death. “Now, go check on your sister and see if you can get her into the house.”
Mark looked back out the window at the sprawled shape of his sister and then turned to his mother. “I think she’s dead, Mom. I think you killed her.”
His mother only shrugged. “Ah, well, maybe you’re right. She was trouble anyway Mark, you know that. Didn’t you see my fingers?”
Mark shook his head and started walking back to his room in silence. He could hear the wail of approaching sirens and wondered if this was the end of the nightmare or just a new beginning.
He closed his bedroom door, and sat down heavily on his bed. He could feel tears brimming behind his eyes. He wondered what would possibly come next. Jenna had been the one butting heads with their mother for the past several months, and she had been taking most of the heat. With her gone, Mark could only imagine where the fury would now be directed. Would Laney be considered trouble in the coming months, or would he?
As he wrestled with his tears, he spotted the painting still hanging above his dresser. It had not fallen off the wall and smashed as he had hoped. Instead, it seemed more vibrant than ever, uglier too. It looked to be the same clown, but there was something different as well. Something in the painting had changed.
Downstairs he heard the doorbell ring, and then his mother talking with someone. It was probably the police or the paramedics, he didn’t know which and found he didn’t really care. Jenna was dead, and he knew nothing would bring her back just as he knew nothing would happen to his mother.
She would be able to talk her way out of this the same way she had talked her way out of so many other jams in the past. Crazy people were good at talking their way out of jams it seemed, and his mother was no exception. Mostly it was minor stuff like traffic tickets and unpaid bills. Sometimes, though, it was bigger stuff. Like the time she had killed the neighbor’s dog for barking.
Mark lay back against his pillow and looked up at that ugly clown. Its dark eyes, which had always seemed so distant and uncaring, were now locked on his. He rolled slightly to the right, and then back to the left, watching as its eyes followed him. He had experienced this with other paintings, and knew it was just an illusion, but the clown’s eyes had never followed him before. They had always seemed fixed.
He stood up and walked to the other side of the room to see if he was just imagining it.
He wasn’t.
Those eyes followed him wherever he went. It wasn’t until he reached the far corner that Mark realized that it wasn’t just the clown’s eyes following his movements, but its whole head. The movement was slight, but it was there.
He crept up to the painting, and peered more closely at it. The makeup was thick and caked on. Mark could see that it had cracked in places and had started to flake off like old paint. There was an odor coming from the painting as well, a wet greasy smell, like rotten bacon or sweaty onions. And beneath that, there was another smell, even worse. It was something like cheap wine that had turned to vinegar or maybe spoiled fruit that had been forgotten in some dank and dirty warehouse.
The stench was awful. The clown had the worst bad breath he had ever smelled and Mark wondered absently what you had to eat to get breath like that. He pushed the thought away realizing that he didn’t want to know the answer to that particular question. Not now, not ever.
Mark snapped his head back, suddenly aware that he had leaned so close to the painting that his nose had touched the black canvas. He wiped at his face with his right hand and his fingers came back wet, smeared on them was a small bit of white face paint. It was both greasy and powdery, the combination felt wrong on his fingertips. Wet and dry at the same time, greasy and tacky. He absently wiped it on his shirt, not liking the way it felt.
The door suddenly swung open and Mark stepped back even further. He turned towards his mother in surprise and terror. He expected her to be in a foul mood but she was completely composed now, relaxed even. All the rage he had seen on her face in Jenna’s room was gone. She stepped slowly into the room, her hands neatly folded behind her back.
“The police are gone.” She said. “So is Jenna.”
“Was she dead?” Mark asked.
His mother paused. “She died a long time ago Mark. What you saw was just her body catching up with her soul.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Mark asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough I think. Laney too.”
“What are you talking about?” He asked. He was scared now, more scared than he had ever been, and he continued to back away from her.
His mother didn’t answer his question, but turned her head to the painting. “I see you’ve been looking at this. Have you changed your mind about it yet?”
“No!” Mark almost screamed, his eyes flicking towards the clown. “It’sÉit’sÉ”
“It’s beautiful.” She finished for him. “Isn’t it?” She lifted a hand up and caressed the stubbly cheek.
Mark’s eyes widened. The clown seemed to lean into that caress and as it did Mark saw that the frown was gone. It had been replaced by a wide evil grin that was all teeth and no lips. Mark looked at that grin and started to scream just as his mother pulled a bloody sock out from behind her back and shoved it into Mark’s mouth.
