A seven-foot-tall witch with green glowing eyes . . . A Frankenstein that shifts in the wind, struggling to free himself from his nylon tethers . . . Gravestones embossed with names of famous killers . . . A speaker (or maybe insect) hidden somewhere in the woods, sounding off like a high voltage circuit switching on and off, on and off . . . A murder of crows perched on the pumps at the gas station as if placed there, too, to frighten . . .
Terry Shaver leans against the brick wall of Stewart’s and starts patting himself: front, back, side to side. Shit. After the two-mile walk from Nonna’s house into town, he’d forgotten his wallet. He checks his phone for the time; the police said not to come back for at least a couple hours. To just relax. To breathe. They didn’t care about anything except what they were looking for: just a few swabs of the cracks in the yellowing hardwood floors of his bedroom. Apparently, a murder had been committed there years before Nonna moved in.
He leans there with the cold brick rough against the back, trying and failing to work up the courage to ask someone for a dollar. I’ll hit up this next one, he says to himself. No, this one here, he says. For real, this next one, then.
But his confidence is fading; like his octopus is fading, the animal he’d graffitied onto the free-air pump of this gas station back in high school. How long ago was that? Three, going on four years now? And already the metal box that contains the compressor is rejecting the thick acrylic lines of robin’s egg he dashed off with a paint pen, as he’d been so prone to do.
“Hey, can I bum a dollar?”
The passerby ignores him—or didn’t hear; his accumulating embarrassment paired with his dry throat has thinned his voice to a whisper. The acrylic on the free air pump radiates back at him the same thirst he feels, rusty and flaky as the lining of his throat, and makes him wonder: What will be left of him after the last of his octopus vanishes? A ridiculous thought, he knew.
No doubt—working in the carpenter’s union for his ex’s uncle this past year had scrambled him irrepressibly. Between the jobsite and Sunday dinners, the man had been two different people, and Terry had held to the belief it was hazing until it clearly wasn’t. He tried to tell his ex about the tipping of the port-o-john and the way the cold whipped through the skyscraper and how the chords stood out in his neck when the uncle screamed at him, the purpled hue of his craggy face, but she couldn’t reckon this account with the beloved man who joked with her family over ziti and red wine. And toward the end, Terry had taken to wearing a large Carhartt beanie that he could flip down over his eyes on the jobsite to hide his crying.
He’s wearing the same beanie now as the headlights of a bluish-gray T-bird swing on him and noses up to his shins, radiating with the magnesium smell of a blown firework and muffled bass. Two hulking shadows stare out at him from behind a bug-smeared window—expressionless, unmoving, waxlike until they aren’t. The doors swing open, and a rapper’s voice clarifies as two heads float into his view: both the approximate size and weight of Christmas hams; identical patchy beards and small, dark eyes; long, flat, pale faces held upon thick necks, like twin tribal masks strapped to tree stumps. The bodies further materialize as two men stride toward him without smiling, in a way that causes Terry to abandon his quest to quench his thirst.
One speaks: “Wassup, Terry!?”
Then the other chimes in: “I don’t think he recognizes us, bro.”
“Why would Terry remember us?”
“It’s been years.”
“Aren’t we the cocky ones?”
But Terry does recognize them. Of course he recognizes them—from senior art class back in high school. Everyone knew them: the Slint brothers. They were famous for their bathroom art: these highly vulgar scenes dashed off with paint pens in the stalls of the boys’ and girls’ rooms alike: Prince Alberted penises, drooling mouths, highly realistic vaginas with endless folds, engorged breasts tattooed like a sailor’s arm. No one could ever prove anything. But when a chlorine bomb detonated in the third-floor janitorial closet, they were suspected; a cell-phone video had gone around that featured a girl from another school; all of them had bags over their heads; the Slint brothers were also suspected. A cult following had formed in this fashion.
Terry says: “I recognize you two! Benny, Holder. Wassup?”
They take turns slapping his hand with those meaty mitts that always made the detail of their artwork in art class that much more remarkable. Like flank steaks reanimated to craft origami, he remembers thinking.
The one named Holder shrugs. “You know, mischief night and all.”
“Mischief night?”
“Damn right,” Holder says, without elaborating, as the one named Benny pushes into Stewart’s, leaving a greasy handprint on the glass. Then the hydraulic door wheezes shut while Holder appraises the octopus tag on free-air pump. “This you?”
“You remember?” Terry says.
“I recognize your style. You still draw?”
“Not so much.”
“Busy, though?
“Down in White Plains. Carpenter’s union in Manhattan. Skyscrapers, the Lower East Side. My ex knows the union boss.”
“But you’re not down there anymore, are you, Terry?”
Terry shrugs. “What about you?”
Turns out, they’ve recently gone into the business of painting houses, have been working up in that new development on the hill above the townhouses where Nonna lived. Got a paint sprayer, an extension to support transporting a forty-foot ladder, everything.
“Matter fact,” Holder says, they have more than they can handle. They were actually just talking about bringing another man onto the crew. Now, just lookit. No doubt Terry can cut a steady line with those artist’s hands. Is he interested? Does he need a job? All he needs to do is say the word, they’d try him out.
“Just say the word, Terry,” Holder says again. “C’mon, Terry, say it. Sayyyyyyyyyy it. Say it.”
“I’m saying it,” Terry says, laughing. “Consider it said.”
“Good decision.”
“When do I start?”
“Tonight?”
“You mean for work?”
“Absolutely not.” After six o’clock, in the Slint Bros’ book, work is sacrilege, he explains. There’ll be none of that. What they are going to do is some art. He still likes art, right? What a better time to check if he vibed with their crew than mischief night?
“Mischief night?” Terry didn’t mean to make it sound like a question.
Holder fakes a gasp. “The night before Halloween? The reason everyone locks up their black cats and pays extra to have their mailboxes reenforced with steel rods. You know, that shaving-cream-and-toilet-paper type of kid stuff.”
Terry smiles. “Hell yeah? I used to do that, back in the day.”
“Yeah, back when you still tagged your octopus. It might surprise you to discover that some of us never stopped.” Holden throws back his waxen mask–like face and starts laughing. “The addict craves novelty, does he not?”
Terry starts laughing, too, though he has no idea what Holder is talking about. And when Benny strides out of the gas station with a case of beer (malt liquor, really), he joins their laughter as if he’s been listening all along. Then, abruptly, the laughter stops; Benny looks at Holder, looks at Terry, then back to Holder: “Is he in, then, or what?”
Inside the T-bird, Benny turns the music back up. The bass makes Terry’s eardrums ache. Yet somehow the car’s odor is even louder. As the car lurches backward, whirling around in the small parking lot and barely dodging its single gas pump, a deep voice begins to rap slow and violent and so incoherent, on second thought, maybe it’s no voice at all, but an elongated electronic sound effect. All of it: undergirded by the arrhythmic crinkling of what reminds Terry of electric tinfoil.
The burnt chortle of the engine vibrates the seats while Holder drives.
“What’s that smell?” Terry attempts over the noise. No answer. But Jesus—something seriously unholy is seriously steaming from the garbage on the seat beside him. Even with the blast of cool from the rolled-down windows, the terrible smell refuses to vacate the car.
He tries to settle into the backseat—but he can’t spot a drop of paint anywhere.
“Where we headed, then?” he tries again. Still nothing.
In art class, Terry recalls, the Slint brothers never were big talkers. They talked with their hands. However, they always stopped by his desk to peer over his shoulder, to encourage the drawings he drew: the Frankensteins and werewolves, the craggy castles and the frothingly mad kings perched upon their thrones of bodies. His octopi. What his ex called “kid stuff.”
Benny turns around and shouts over the music: “You want a beer?”
“Hell yes, I do,” Terry says, and his mouth floods with anticipatory drool. But then Benny doesn’t hand him anything. Instead, Benny turns around, shoves his hand out the window, and proceeds to ride the breeze with his palm while bobbing to the bass-y track, a song that seems to be playing on repeat, the same electric crinkling and electronic voice-y throbs. The yellow line keeping along in the spray of the headlights of the T-bird.
The beer. Was Holder messing with him or had he forgotten? Terry thinks. He’s forgotten, he decides, smacking his dry lips. Not everyone is like the uncle. And not everyone is like the ex.
So, Terry tries again, this time: louder. “So what about that beer?” he says.
“Man, you downed that quick. Try to pace yourself,” Holder says.
The music was like a heavy fog, pressing into everything. Holder surprises him by turning the wheel onto the swampy road that leads to the townhouse. The T-bird slows. They’d been driving so long now along the closed throats of the back roads, Terry thinks they’d be somewhere else. Yet here they are: the corridor of endless identical houses strobing with the blue-and-reds of the police lights. Many of the cruisers concentrated around his Nonna’s townhouse.
Benny turns the music down. “Cheese it—the cops!”
“The fuzz!” Holder says.
“At the murder house, no less.”
“Quick, Terry, throw that beer out.”
“The flat foots at the scene of the crime!”
“The murder house?” Terry says. Nothing.
“Dare we continue, my brother?”
“Dare we?” Holder says.
Then Benny turns the music back up. And they continue: Holder dares; he drives, the identical townhouses shrinking and the new houses on the hill swelling up—the same development that Terry views from his Nonna’s impossibly small bathroom while he takes a shit, looking up from searching Craigslist on his cell phone for jobs.
They have a passcode to one of the garages. Three cars fit in here, easy. There’s even a spot of oil on the floor. These large, empty shelves to the left of where the T-bird is parked could be Terry’s childhood bunkbeds at his old house. He hears the door grinding to a close behind them.
“You live here, then?” Terry says, weak with equal parts fear and thirst.
This question, too, is ignored. Instead, Holder asks Terry to hand them the bag from the seat beside him, what feels simultaneously limp and rigid in his hands, like a mix of bread loaves and kite parts. The Slint brothers crouch over it while Terry stands watching, fighting the urge to fold his Carhartt beanie over his eyes, his mouth filling with all the questions he’s afraid to ask.
They spread the garbage bag open; the smell from the car infiltrates the garage.
“Fuck, man,” Benny says to him. “You’re buggering my light.”
“Yo Terry. Move over,” Holder says. “What are you, drunk?”
And Terry moves over, mumbling an apology. A shapeless exertion of breath escapes him, given what the light clarifies. Look. At what’s inside the bag. Just look. What’s inside the bag, Terry?
A feathery organ: a wing and feathers. Talons.
The Slint brothers look at each other. Then at Terry, and the smirk they exchanged isn’t the same as what passes from them and Terry. No, not at all.
Terry says, “You don’t paint houses, do you?”
With the same silence they exhibited during art class, the brothers proceed to move their fingers across the bird with what can only be referred to as grace, untangling what appears to be indicatrixes of high-tension fishing line. Then, a stepladder that must’ve been waiting for them appears, what must’ve been planted for this. Just like the hooks on the beams on the ceiling must’ve been planted, Terry now realizes.
Through which Benny now laces the ends of the fishing line that aren’t knotted to the joints of the tattered bird.
The rehearsed intricacy of their entire operation frightens Terry. How many times have they done this, to reduce this bizarre act to such fluidity? It’s hard not to become mesmerized by the levity of those enormous hands. The coordination between the brothers.
Terry folds the beanie over his eyes, allowing his vision no more than a small slot. Which, now, he can’t bring himself to utilize. God, he thinks into the comforting blackness of fabric. I’ve looked for that synchronization everywhere. Most people probably don’t share this with anyone for their entire lives. Then he peeks through the slot.
Holder is pulling on the fishing line taut along the eyelets as Benny lifts the limp bird. He then releases the bird, allowing it to hang there with its beak open in a frozen snore. They seem done with what they wanted to be doing, and it’s here that they turn to Terry and ask him to hit the button. For the garage door.
“The garage?”
“It’s right there on the wall, Terry.”
“Right there, Terry.”
“The square one—goddamn. I told you not to drink so much.”
“We’re asking you to ride the ride, Terry.”
It’s unclear to Terry if they’re really asking him to hit the button or not, if this is another form of the hazing he seems incapable of identifying. Their questions sound a lot like the questions the uncle’s did before the cords stood out in his neck—“You good, Terry? You got this?”—before the uncle would slap Terry’s hard hat with all his might, knocking him sideways. And so, the moment hangs there, and hangs there, waiting for Terry to do something. Or do nothing. He doesn’t know yet. All he wants to do is run.
“C’mon, Terry. C’mon,” they continue, as darkly and hypnotic as the rap song in the T-bird.
But after so much of this, his body decides for him: Terry’s legs walk him across the shiny concrete floor to the button and he pushes it. The gears of the machine overhead whir, and the high-tension fishing line glides along the eyelets, making the puppet of the bird do what the Slint brothers want: the garage-door chain pulling along the ceiling and the wings pulling wider, too, causing the stench in the garage to becomes something else, a fold they all step into, and the wings of the bird coming to life. To stretch wider. Wider. Impossibly wider. Without breaking. And with it, the Slint brothers’ fat, yellow smiles growing wider as well. Their teeth growing thick in their mouths at the genius of what will surely be the incoming homeowner’s absolute terror and surprise. Before turning to Terry with another demand, to drink it in and join in on their fun. “C’mon, Terry, c’mon,” they say, again and again, until he forces a smile to match theirs and finally does.
Harris Lahti’s short stories have appeared in BOMB, Ninth Letter, Blue Arrangements, Forever Magazine, and elsewhere. He cofounded the new press Cash 4 Gold Books and edits fiction for Fence. His debut novel, Foreclosure Gothic, is out now, via Astra House.
Illustration: Nick Stout
