They tell Nicole she can have her turntable again since she’s no longer a danger to herself or others. At first, Dr. Sondheim is concerned she might shatter one of the records and use the vinyl fragments to cut her own flesh or lash out at the nurses or orderlies. Or even Dr. Sondheim himself.
“No, never,” Nicole says. “I just want to chill with some vinyl. Streaming isn’t the same. I need the warm sound of my records.”
The words aren’t hers. They’re Vance’s. She doesn’t know the first thing about records; vinyl was Vance’s love. “Vinyl sounds so warm,” he would say. “Nothing else sounds like it.”
“Nothing else sounds like it,” Nicole says to Dr. Sondheim.
They sit in the doctor’s office. It looks like what a psychiatrist’s office is supposed tolook like, Nicole thinks: heavy oak desk before an expansive picture window. Walls covered with bookshelves and objets d’art. Nothing out of place. An artful space for a serene mind.
Dr. Sondheim raises his tablet to his lips and taps the corner thoughtfully against his salt-and-pepper goatee. He looks like how a psychiatrist is supposed to look, Nicole thinks.
“You know what?” the doctor says. “Yes. Yes, I think it’ll be okay. You’ve really come a long way over the past year. I think the turntable might be okay.”
Nicole beams, stands from the patients’ sofa, and raises her arms toward the ceiling. She turns one rotation, a happy pirouette, and says, “Thank you so much, Dr. Sondheim. I think this is going to be good for me.”
“I’m glad, Nicole. I’ll get one of the orderlies to bring the turntable and your records up from storage.”
“Awesome.” Nicole tilts her head and gives Dr. Sondheim a speculative look. “Dr. Sondheim, why am I here? I know I’m confused sometimes, but they don’t make people stay in the nuthatch for being confused. Why am I here? Is it because of what I told you about my father?”
Dr. Sondheim’s face clouds. “We’ll work on getting you to a place where you can remember, Nicole. Let’s focus on positive things: records, music. Then we can try to make some progress toward what happened to Vance. And please, don’t call it a ‘nuthatch.’ It’s an offensive and archaic word.”
The storm front advances from the doctor’s face to Nicole’s. “Where the hell is Vance, anyway? It’s like he doesn’t care that I’m locked away in here. He never visits.”
“I’m sorry, Nicole. I’m sorry Vance doesn’t visit.”
The afternoon nurse opens the door. “Nicole, honey. Ready for some game time before dinner? Your session’s up.”
“Okay. But no game time for me. Vance keeps screaming at me during game time. He never visits, but he can scream at me? I hate it. Maybe I’ll just sit and read.”
The nurse and Dr. Sondheim exchange glances, brows furrowed.
“Sure, honey. Whatever you like.”
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Nicole basks in the afternoon sunlight that streams through the floor-to-ceiling window that looks out over the grounds of the Barrett Ferguson Psychiatric Center campus four stories below. The common room is air-conditioned, and it’s comfortable in this little corner, but Nicole knows how humid the Maryland air is in August. It’s the kind of weather things rot in. Nicole thinks of the smell of roadkill: possum, deer, rabbits. Something that dies in that heat, it doesn’t dry up. It’s a steamy, decadent rot. It writhes with dark, new life. Hungry new life. The maggots eat and eat and eat until there’s nothing left but the hard parts that can’t sustain anything.
Nicole surveys the common room: the game players and the starers. And Vance. He’s standing in the doorway that leads to the south wing of the facility.
Why is Vance coming from the south wing? We’re not allowed down there.
“Vance,” she says. Hisses. She raises a tentative hand to him, but he ignores her. Her voice turns strident, loud enough for him to hear even across the room: “Why are you here? What do you want if not to visit?” The nurses at the nurses’ station look her way, wondering if this is a prelude to some kind of trouble. The other patients glance at her, too. But most of their eyes are glassy and don’t betray much interest. Some look at her, and at Vance, and askance back at her.
Vance angles his head toward her. His skin is a blotchy purple, and his eyes are loose, like fried egg whites rather than orbs. Like something left out to decompose in the summer sun. She can smell him now, under the bleach and lemony floor cleaning solution. A putrescence billows from him like a little mushroom cloud of foulness. He opens his mouth and screams. It’s a thousand times worse than his screams during game time; usually she can only hear him, not see his loose mouth-gape. And this time it’s not really a people-scream: it’s a scream from space, from Hell, and it’s inside her head more than in her ears. She can hear other sounds too, mixed in, sounds like wind and fire.
“Unh,” Nicole says. “Unh.” She slaps her hands against her face, and a plaintive moan escapes her lips. “Don’t eat me, Vance. Don’t eat me, Vance.” His scream continues, and she slaps her hands against her ears. Everything is muted for a second from the sudden pressure against her eardrums. But the scream isn’t an ear-noise anyway; it’s a thing Vance pushes directly into her, bypassing her ears entirely. Since she can’t fight it, she joins it, opening her mouth to release her own jagged cry: coarse, as though her breath were laced with sand. There’s a commotion at the nurses’ station, and two of them run over to her, weaving through the colorful tables where the game-players sit. They give her something, maybe Haldol; after a couple of minutes, everything is quiet again. She sits and looks out the window, and the nurses head back to their station, shaking their heads. Rotting-Vance is gone. Probably wasn’t even there at all. It was just her talking about him visiting that made her imagine it.
Vance.
The way he’d been standing there…just like the last time she saw him. It had been August then, too, hadn’t it? Just before he fell to the patio—
Nicole slaps herself again. The nurses look up, but she doesn’t repeat the smack. They go back to their work, satisfied that the immediate crisis is over.
She has a hard time remembering anything just before she came to Barrett Ferguson. Well. Not came, was brought to Barrett Ferguson. She remembers when the police arrived at the house; she asked Vance if he called them, but he didn’t answer. The police took her, didn’t let her say goodbye to Vance, just took her. She spent the night in jail, then they took her to a hospital: a regular hospital; then they brought her here. Every time she casts back to the few days before the police, the memories get fuzzy; when she tries harder to recall them, it’s like her mind says “nope” and shifts her to another thought.
Vance came once to visit after they brought her to Barrett Ferguson. He didn’t speak then, either. He just stared at her from the corner of her little room. They gave all the inmates at Barrett Ferguson little safety razors in their toilet kits, and she’d flexed the head of the razor until the plastic snapped and the blade was free, then used the naked blade to cut herself until Vance left and the sheets and blankets were soaked with blood. She’d expected to get in trouble, but all the doctors and nurses just seemed worried; they talked about “shifting protocols” to something “more efficacious.” That apparently included no more razors.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
She sleeps well that night; maybe the Haldol had some soporific aftereffect. In the morning, she wakes to a nurse opening the door and stepping out of the way while a big male orderly hefts in the bulky turntable and amplifier.
“Did the doc know what you were asking when you said you wanted your record player? I still gotta get the speakers. I hope this is really okay, and the doc knew what you were asking.”
“He said music is important, focus on the records and music, positive things,” Nicole says.
“Okay, whatever, I’ll be back in a sec, and we can set it up.”
Hooking everything up doesn’t take long. They stand aside as Nicole picks up a short stack of sleeved vinyl from the much larger stack on the floor. The first record in her hands is dusty from being in the basement at Barrett Ferguson. She takes the hem of her T-shirt and wipes it in an arc across the cover. It’s Erik Satie. The album with Gnossienne No. 4: it’s the piece that was playing the last time she saw Vance.
She gives a little smile at the memory and immediately feels self-conscious, looking at the nurse and orderly in turn, but they smile back.
“Good memories?” the nurse asks.
“Oh,” Nicole says, sobering. “Yes. A song on this record was playing the last time I saw Vance. My husband Vance. That’s a good memory.”
The nurse looks askance at her. “That’s a good memory? Shit. I mean. Your husband?”
Nicole blushes. “It’s the last time I saw him.”
“Yeah, no shit. The last time you saw him was the last time anybody saw him breathing.”
“What? No, not true. He actually came to visit me here last year. Yesterday, too. I mean, he was…” Her eyes unfocus. Dead, right? He was dead, right, Nicole?
“Came to visit yesterday, huh? Girl, get comfortable, because you are definitely where you need to be.” The nurse nudges the orderly and they leave, shutting the door behind them.
“Dead people don’t visit living people; ergo: not dead,” Nicole says out loud to no one, except maybe any dead people who might be listening. She puts on the Satie record and drops the needle onto the black space before Gnossienne No. 4.
The opening bass notes ascend and descend, followed by the tense minor line. Nicole’s guts clench when the sinewy melody kicks in. So do her lungs. She feels she’s breathing through a straw, gasping; she remembers a conversation with Vance a long time ago.
“What even is a Gnossienne? Do you know?” She’d asked.
“Satie made it up,” Vance said. “Nobody knows why he called it a Gnossienne, but it might be because they were digging up Knossos in Crete when he wrote these pieces. That’s where the Minotaur was, I think? These songs do take you places, though. Maybe he thought these songs were like a maze with a monster at the end.”
She flicks her hand to the turntable and knocks the tonearm off the record. It squawks and goes silent, but her muscles relax, too.
A maze with a monster at the end.
She’s still gasping, but it’s easing up. She inspects the needle and puts it back on track 4 and waits for the song to begin again. This time she’s ready.
“This sound is so warm. There’s nothing else like it,” she says, again to no one except the invisible dead things that might be listening.
“I’m sorry, Vance. I’m sorry.” She’s crying now.
She remembers Vance again, but in the memory, he’s not doing much of anything except lying there, drawing flies. Out by the pool with a shattered glass a few feet behind him in a puddle of melted ice cubes.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Vance dies on a Friday afternoon.
The night before, Thursday night, Nicole wakes and stares at herself in the bathroom mirror for—God, it goes on for four or five hours. Vance wakes up to piss and finds her there, slack-jawed and shaking.
“Don’t eat me, Vance,” she says. “I don’t want to be some cannibal joke on the internet. The cannibals know about the spaces between songs. They know to be quiet. They know how to keep the music going.”
Vance squints at her; his eyes haven’t adjusted to the bathroom light.
“What, babe? What? Why would I cannibalize you? What?”
She starts to cry. “Something’s wrong with me. Something’s not right.”
He holds her from behind, kisses her cheek. He asks her if she has to pee, and when she shakes her head no, he pees, then leads her back to bed.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Okay, yeah, sorry. Okay.”
“Nothing to be sorry for. Try to get some rest.”
He’s back asleep in a few minutes, but she knows he’s faking it. She can feel his body, patient and relaxed but predatory next to her. She feigns sleep herself, but clenches her fists beneath the blanket: The second he comes toward me with those teeth, those sharp teeth he keeps hidden until he eats, until he comes at me with those, the second he comes at me with those teeth, I have to act.
But she doesn’t act; she falls asleep, insulated in her cocoon of fear.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
“You really love that piece, eh?”
Dr. Sondheim stands in the doorway. Gnossienne No. 4 is playing. Nicole has it down to a science; when the last note decays in the air, she lets it play for a second longer. The pause between tracks is endless, like some magical hut in a myth that’s larger inside than it is outside. The space between tracks stretches for hours. She can hear voices there amongst the pops and cracks of the needle on the vinyl. She listens hard to discern their words, but it’s difficult. There are other sounds there, too: wind and rain, maybe fire.
The pause ends, and the next piece begins: Gnossienne No. 5. Dr. Sondheim says, “This one’s lovely as well. Satie’s music seems simple, but there’s a lot of complexity there to admire. He was a true artist.” Nicole jumps from the bed and grabs the tonearm almost viciously and repositions it to the gap before Gnossienne No. 4. There’s the hiss of the inter-aural space and the voices in their world of wind, rain, and fire; she listens hard, but Dr. Sondheim’s presence spoils it.
“I think maybe you’re focusing too much on this one piece, Nicole. Sandra tells me this was the song playing when your husband…when you last saw Vance?”
Nicole is silent.
“Can you talk about that some?”
“You’re right, Gnossienne No. 5 is good, too,” Nicole says, and smiles at him. “We can listen to that one. After.” She inclines her head toward the turntable.
Dr. Sondheim sighs. “Okay. Maybe we talk more at our p.m. session.” It’s not a question, and Nicole ignores it. She hopes he leaves soon, before she steps into the space between songs. Maybe Vance is there and can explain why he came yesterday, why he screamed at her and left without saying anything. Why he’s rotting.
Dr. Sondheim leaves, sighing again and frowning.
No. 4 ends. In that infinite pause, she does hear Vance, and the crackling of the elements that accompany his presence. Hey, Nic, he says, but the voice is like Vance’s cannibal-teeth: they seem okay on the surface, white and smooth, but she knows there’s a sharp row behind them that some cruel biology has evolved to only come out when he’s hungry and ready to devour flesh. The voice hides something lethal, too. Hey, Nic, there’s a monster at the end of the maze. Guess who it is, Nic? You can’t stay in the spaces between songs forever. Those are for the dead.
She bolts up from the bed and knocks the tonearm off the disc the way she did that first time. She doesn’t want to hear Vance’s cannibal-voice again. She stares at the spinning record, gulps air, and licks her lips.
“I don’t want to hear your cannibal voice, Vance,” she says, but nevertheless resets the needle for the nth time. Vance’s cannibal-voice scratches and skitters from the vinyl: You have to get through the maze, Nic. Find out what’s at the end.
Gnossienne No. 4 begins, and Nicole’s turbulent thoughts coalesce back on their house in Bethesda again.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
“I’m worried about you after last night,” Vance says. He pulls on his sportscoat, getting ready to leave for work. Nicole doesn’t work anymore; she couldn’t go back after what happened with the baby last year. The baby came from me. The baby came from cannibal stock. There was no other way.
He hugs her. His mouth is near her neck, and it’s all she can do to keep from screaming: his breath is hot and moist, and she can feel the hunger there. It’s so strong, so throbbing and pulsing with carnivorous glee; she can’t imagine how he keeps it at bay. She keeps her cool and nudges him away.
“It’s Friday. I can take off after lunch, let’s do something, get out of the house for the weekend, maybe?”
“You don’t have to, no, you don’t have to do that. I’m fine.”
“I know I don’t have to, I want to.”
Be cagey; be clever, Nic.
“Okay, whatever you want.”
“Great, I’ll be back after lunch.”
She knows she has a few hours, then.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Where is the entrance to the maze, though? I guess where Vance was yesterday? How am I going to get down there with all these people?
She opens the door to her room and peers down the hallway. The walls are white, with gray carpet and a white rubber chair rail that runs its length on both sides. She can see the counter at the nurse’s station. It’s gray too and is flecked with other colors like cupcake sprinkles. There are two nurses at the station. Jess is small and dark-haired. Vivian is blond and smokes. Every fifteen minutes, almost to the second.
Nicole pads out of her room toward them. Vivian and Jess are both busy and have their backs to her. Vivian’s cigarettes sit on the counter with her lighter atop. Nicole palms them both and hurries back down the hall toward her room. She has fifteen minutes, give or take.
The doors are ajar in several of the patient rooms, their occupants out in the common room. The first is empty of people, but there’s a wastebasket, curtains, and blankets. She unspools toilet tissue into the trash, sets it alight with the lighter, and places it under the curtains with the blankets draped from the bed into the wastebasket. She closes the door, moves on to the next room, and repeats the act. The next room is locked, but the next isn’t: a janitorial closet. She piles what she thinks will burn and tries to set it alight. It resists at first but eventually gives in; the flame spreads more quickly than she’d anticipated. Some of the plastic is burning and emitting ribbons of silky black smoke from sputtering tongues that hiss like trapped demons. She hurries out and closes the door. Smoke seeps around the cracks below the doors of the rooms where she started the earlier fires; her eyes widen in terror, but she laughs as well. There’s a roaring: the sound of irrevocable change, finality, consuming fire.
As though born of the flames, a savage, booming Gnossienne No. 4 sounds in Nicole’s ears. At first, she thinks it’s her blood pounding, but the rhythms and pitches are unmistakable. She paws at her ears and bolts down the hall, away from the fire.
As she reaches the nurses’ station, the alarm blares and the sprinkler system kicks in. Nicole doesn’t think it’s enough to stop the conflagration she’s started, but maybe. She has to be clever, and she has to be quick: she ducks into the little U-shaped hallway behind the nurses’ desk. Vivian and Jess jog to the common room and shout over the din, urging everyone to assume emergency positions and evacuate. They’re herding everyone toward the exit, but Nicole is safe and concealed in the alcove, cowering from the thundering Gnossienne.
“It’s not a drill,” Jess says over the clamor of the alarms and confused voices. “There’s smoke in the west hall, everybody out.” They cluster near the stairs by the elevator. Vivian is trying to count people, but it’s too chaotic: she gives up and they all shuffle into the stairwell. In no time at all, the fourth floor is empty. Nicole waits a few more minutes, but sirens wail in the distance; she steps out of the hall and into the common room.
The alarm is still ringing, and the news is blasting from the TV, but it’s weak and childlike under the pulsing, syncopated Gnossienne that dominates Nicole’s mind like the smoke that’s begun to fill the room. The sprinklers clear the air some, but it’s still bad. The TV is showing a news crawl: “Breaking News: Reports of Fire at Barrett Ferguson Psychiatric Hospital.”Nicole smiles. I’m famous, Vance. I’m famous. It continues, “Dangerous criminals being evacuated by staff.” Nicole furrows her brow at that. Dangerous criminals? We’re patients, not criminals.
Rotting Vance is there at the entrance of the hallway to the south wing. It’s open; it’s not supposed to be. The south wing is where the doctors and nurses and orderlies go. They keep it shut. But Vance has opened it.
He smiles, and Nicole screams: he displays his cannibal-teeth proudly now; there’s no need to hide them anymore. His rotting lips split to accommodate those jutting, needle-like fangs: knives, razors, weapons. He opens and closes them, and they fit together perfectly, a monstrous work of art, precision-engineered to puncture, cut, and devour.
There’s a light in Vance’s eyes, like a child at an amusement park. He gestures toward the yawning door: it seems gigantic now, like the door to a castle or a Greek maze. The Gnossienne ends, and in that pause, she hears the crackling of storms and infernos and Vance, in a voice that sounds produced more by coarse stones grinding than vocal cords: Your maze, Nic.
He beckons; she follows; the Gnossienne plays again.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Lights flash in the hallway; smoke has begun to fill the south wing, too. Vance leads, moving with an odd, jagged gait as though unfamiliar with his own body. He looks back at her, and she thinks the teeth will be gone. One of those delusions, Nic. You had one of those delusions again. But they’re not gone. The cannibal-teeth grin from that rotting face like some rare aquatic predator pulled from the deep ocean. His eyes—those fried-egg, rotting eyes—are delighted. She can feel his excitement, and she’s afraid for herself. Because she was thinking this was all a delusion, that it wasn’t quite right. But everything is hanging together now—in a disturbingly hallucinogenic way, yes—but it’s also disturbingly consistent. She feels a memory tickling her brain, a recollection of something she’s done, maybe. That nagging pull combined with the possibility that this really is Vance makes her spine ache and her skull feel as though it’s vulnerable and fragmented like a newborn’s but still hard like an adult’s: like it’s scraping her brain with its cruel, broken edges.
Vance halts at a door labeled records and turns the handle. Nicole knows it should be locked, but it opens under Vance’s touch. She had no doubt it would. Vance is a cannibal. Vance is a sorcerer. Vance brings endings.
Inside the room, there’s another counter like the nurses’ station counter. It’s gray and flecked with other colors like cupcake sprinkles too, but it’s longer, and there’s a service door in it. But she doesn’t need to use it because what she came for is right there on the counter: a thick red folder. She glances at the tab: Nicole Madison. Me.
There are a lot of papers in the folder. Nicole flips through the whole stack with her thumb. The pages chunk on thicker stock at a few places; she feels for the first one and opens the folder to it. There are several photos there. The first one is Vance. He’s lying by the pool, face-up; there’s broken glass next to him, but the ice has melted away. The photo was taken from far away, but she flips to the next one, and it’s closer. “You got fat, Vance,” Nicole says. But no. He’s not fat. He’s bloated. Because he’s been lying there by the pool for three days, because the police didn’t come until late Monday afternoon. And it’s August. The kind of weather things rot in. He’s bloated and boiling with maggots.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Friday, Vance gets home early like he said he would. He goes to change clothes, and Nicole makes them drinks at the bar.
She bought the aconite at the health food store; it’s in a baggy in the back pocket of her jeans. Over-the-counter. She pulverized the little white pills to a fine powder using the mortar and pestle in the kitchen. She fixes their drinks: a whiskey, water, and aconite for him and a vodka and diet tonic for her, both on the rocks. Some of the aconite powder clings to the cubes and the rest drifts to the bottom of the glass like an ill-fated diver plunging headfirst into a rocky swimming hole. It’s a corpse, there in the glass. Vance’s corpse, that soggy little mound of aconite: it’s almost the miracle of transubstantiation, bound to the next few minutes with shackles of steel. She mixes it in. It isn’t cloudy. There’s no smell other than whiskey.
Satie wafts from the speakers in the family room. The sound system is wired to speakers around the house and out over the pool. Vance likes whatever he’s playing to be a soundtrack to their lives, he told her once.
He appears in the doorway, and Nicole hands him his drink. He finishes two thirds of it in a couple of gulps; he’s stressed, but it doesn’t matter. She leads him outside to the patio by the pool.
It’ll look like a heart attack; she’d hoped he might change into his swimsuit. Drowning would be better. But it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.
He finishes the drink and looks out over the pool, holding his glass against his chest with his forearm and rubbing his hands together: “Nic, my hands feel like they’re falling asleep. Or waking up.” He complains about his stomach; his breathing seems labored. He spins to face her. Their eyes meet: he knows.
Gnossienne No. 3 ends the way it does, with those noncommittal notes; the pause between songs stretches, seems endless, as though there’s a possibility that things can change; that the events Nicole has set in motion can be averted. But it’s an illusion.
Gnossienne No. 4 begins.
“Uh,” Vance says. “Uh.” He casts about for support; the glass drops and shatters on the flagstone pool deck. His breathing gets worse, hitching. His face is twisted in pain and fear; he looks like a child. He reaches out toward her and screams, but she turns her back to him and goes into the house, locking the door behind her. Locking out the cannibal. She doesn’t see him fall to the ground. Nobody sees him again at all until Monday afternoon.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Nicole flips to the next set of photos. They’re of the baby; they show what Nicole did: the act that began this methodical path to a burning Barrett Ferguson with the rotting ghoul that was her husband behind her. When he was alive, he never knew; but this Vance knows. I come from cannibal stock, Vance. I guess I never told you. She crumples over the counter and sobs, but it’s brief. She sweeps the folder to the floor, spins, and bolts past Vance, out of the records room and back through the maze-hall toward the common room. It’s far smokier now than it had been; her eyes burn, turning the flashing lights to angry, exploding ghosts she tries to beat away with her hands. She’s already crying, but the smoke makes it worse the closer she gets to the sound of the TV and the sirens.
The common space is still empty, but Nicole guesses firefighters will arrive soon. The plastic vertical blinds are burning, emitting more of the ribbony black smoke. The newscaster on the TV says, “…acquitted of killing her child last year. Madison is still trapped in the building with another unknown individual. Security video captured the two in the fourth-floor common area before the fire destroyed the cameras.”
She races back toward the hall where she first started the fire. The sprinklers have cut a narrow path in the center of the corridor, but it’s still hot; her skin blisters as she passes the burning rooms, and she screams when her hair ignites and blazes on the left side. She strikes at it, burning her hand, but the flames die. She throws herself against the door to her room and pivots to slam it shut.
The turntable’s waiting, crackling with the space between Gnossienne No. 3 and Gnossienne No. 4. There’s fire in that space to augment the sound of the fire outside the door. And wind and storms. Nicole wonders if that’s the sound of where Vance lives now. Somewhere far away, too far to visit easily or often.
Vance is in the corner where he’d been that first time he came. He’s put away his cannibal teeth, and his rotted lips hang slack over his regular teeth. His eyes are fried-egg vacant; he’s like a corpse again. But then he says, End of the maze, Nic. The monster.
The arpeggios of Gnossienne No. 4 begin again.
Nicole looks in the mirror above the bureau and smiles. She imagines the cannibal-teeth that hide beneath her regular teeth; imagines her grin widening to impossible dimensions to accommodate them: she’s a predator, after all. Barrett Ferguson has the photos to prove it, the doctor’s notes, all her private history laid bare. Vance sees, even with his corpse-eyes, he sees. She imagines this is the reveal: monster; cannibal; me. A prosaic, disappointing realization. I already know I’m the monster.
But there’s something else: the smell of smoke is faint now. Instead, a reek of sweat and unwashed skin permeates the air of the room. It’s armpits and groin, and the smell of an hours-old fast food meal carried on hot, moist breath: a repast that left him still hungry.
Him. Vance. Vance? No. Not Vance. Some other him.
The monster. The Monster.
Nicole remembers an old middle school class. Something about New Guinea. Cannibals. The teacher relished her lesson; some of the squeamish students squirmed: Sometimes the cannibals ate only select body parts; sometimes they enjoyed the whole body.
Sometimes The Monster ate only select parts of Nicole. But he always enjoyed the whole body. She’s been churning in his bowels ever since.
“Oh, Vance. Sometimes the eaten have to eat. There were times I had to eat.” She’s crying harder now, but it feels like endings. Pain exceeds some threshold; pain becomes a harbinger of release.
The smoke is creeping under the door. It’s billowing, boiling, but in the mirror its contours are like a man. A cannibal-man. The Monster: sometimes he eats only select body parts; sometimes he enjoys the whole body. He eats and eats until there’s nothing left but the hard parts that can’t sustain anything. The center of the maze is full of discarded bones.
“Happy to see you again, Monster.” Nicole curtsies: an obscene gesture, her hair blackened and her blistering skin creasing in a grim smile.
She remembers a hand over her mouth. He’s put a record on the turntable.
Vance? No. The other he.
He’d always put a record on the turntable. He knew if they were gone longer than the duration of one side, someone would notice. When each song ended, he covered her mouth to keep her silent. It’s a vile rhythm, she learned, a dreadful cadence. But he stopped when he covered her mouth, and the hiss and crackle became respite and solace.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
The firefighters are breaking through the windows in the common room, and maybe other rooms closer, too. But it’s too late for that, for her.
Vance gives a single shallow nod: Vance brings endings.
Gnossienne No. 4 ends; the sound of fire and rain and wind fills the room; The Monster approaches. Nicole prepares to eat and be eaten in turn. One final time.