Stray
by Wes Berger
John couldn't have said exactly why he did it. She didn’t look that old, maybe in her late fifties. She didn’t seem to be struggling to stay on her feet. But when he noticed her get up and let the authentically old lady take her seat, he was standing before he had time to think about it and by then it was too late.
“Would you like to sit?”
She turned her head and her eyes blazed right into him with discomfiting intensity. He instantly wished he had stayed seated.
“What a gentleman!”
The subway car was crowded, especially for this time of night. There had been some sort of service delay. Everyone had waited longer than usual for the train and a collective, low-grade hostility permeated the atmosphere inside. The riders pressed involuntarily against each other with every lurch and acceleration, glaring and grunting like penned animals as she pushed through them to where John had been sitting. She leaned in too close to him.
“Thank you.”
Her voice was loud in the enclosed space. Suddenly the train seemed oddly quiet. John nodded in her direction then turned aside, but she wasn’t done with him yet.
“Thank you, sir.”
He felt her breath, hot on his neck, and mumbled something inaudible. He didn’t look back at her. The last thing he wanted now was to make eye contact.
“You are a wonderful man.”
He tried to move further away from her but there was nowhere to go. He was trapped. They were becoming a spectacle. He sensed as much as saw the smirks and sideways glances, full of commingled empathy and scorn.
The few minutes it took for the train to arrive at his stop were interminable. He did his best to make himself invisible but was certain that the woman’s eyes never left him. As the train ground to a halt, he put his head down and shoved his way through the mass of protesting bodies to the opening door. As he crossed the threshold he turned back briefly and saw, without surprise, that she had risen and was heading towards the exit. No one was moving for her. It didn’t look like she would make it.
John hit the stairs at a jog. He might have felt like he had aged ten years in the last two, but he was still just 33, relatively young and fit and he wanted to get home (away from her) as quickly as he could.
The cold hit him as soon as he left the station and he put on his hat and gloves. It had started to snow. Delicate white tendrils hung in the air, soon to become brown muck clogging the city’s busy streets, sprayed onto pedestrians by oblivious drivers. John used to love the snow. Now he tolerated it because Jake loved it. Jake was nearly four and he thought snow was about the greatest thing in the world, after dinosaurs and great white sharks. His beautiful son. The flower that had bloomed, like a miracle, out of his garbage dump of a marriage.
Thinking about Jake reminded him that he had no food at the apartment, and he stopped at a 7-11 to pick up milk, juice, cereal and canned soup. Everything was marked up in price of course, but nothing else was open now and nothing at all would be open tomorrow. He needed something to feed Jake after he picked him up from his ex-wife’s to spend his court-approved portion of Christmas Day with him. At least he had already bought presents, although they had pushed his straining credit card to its limit.
At the checkout counter he added a Kinder Surprise Egg for a treat. Jake was crazy about those things. He liked assembling the little toy that came inside the plastic bubble even more than he liked eating the chocolate shell. Now that he was past the age where he might have swallowed one of the tiny parts, John had no objection.
When he left the store, a chill wind nipped at his face and thick snowflakes covered his eyelids. He tucked his chin into his jacket and plowed forward, grateful that his apartment, though it was a mouse-plagued basement, was only a few minutes away. Halfway there, he slowed down, struck by a hazy sense of portent. Had he forgotten something at the store? He didn’t think so but reached down to check the bags and make sure.
He felt her before he saw her. It was the woman from the subway. She was right behind him. She had made it out at his stop after all.
John moved quickly, wanting to put space between them. She was probably just some harmless nut, but being followed was an eerie sensation and the last damned thing he needed after sitting in a cubicle for ten hours straight on Christmas Eve.
She was deceptively fast. Once in a while he looked back, but no matter how much he increased his pace she never seemed to be further than twenty steps away.
When he reached his apartment door, John turned around to face her. By the time he could get it unlocked she might catch up with him, and he didn’t want that happening while his back was turned.
She stopped on the sidewalk, and they looked at each other. John could hear his own harsh breathing, but the woman didn’t seem adversely affected by their walking race. She wasn’t wearing a hat, and snowflakes dotted her dark grey hair. She was smiling at him. It was a dazzler of a smile and made her look ten years younger. She looked far too happy to see him, for his liking.
“What do you want?”
The smile only grew wider. Her teeth looked unusually big in relation to the size of her mouth.
“Look, I don’t have time for this.”
John couldn’t meet her eyes any longer.
“I can’t help you.”
He turned away and started to unlock the door. He wasn’t going to let this troubled woman and his own vague feeling of guilt hold him hostage here all night.
He fumbled with his keys and tried to pretend that his shaky hands were a result of the cold. Once, against his will, he looked back to make sure the woman wasn’t approaching him, and there she was. Still standing on the sidewalk. Still smiling at him.
After John had locked the door behind him, the whole thing seemed so ridiculous that he almost laughed, would have laughed, in fact, if a single thought hadn’t been resonating at the bottom of his consciousness: she knows where I live. He remembered a Bible story where people’s doors had been marked to set them apart for the Angel of Death. But had those with marked doors been spared or taken?
His grim reverie was broken when he stepped into the kitchen to see if there was anything edible in his fridge and put his socked foot down into what must have been an inch of freezing water. The apartment had flooded. Again.
“Fuck me.”
He considered calling his landlady and her socially awkward son to tell them. On the plus side they would probably come downstairs and give him a few towels he could use to soak up the water. More than outweighing that, he thought, was the likelihood that the son would spend the rest of the night standing at the top of his stairs while he cleaned up the mess, apologizing that they hadn’t yet had someone over to clear the snow off the roof as promised and trying to sell him on a pyramid scheme that he and his mother had apparently staked their collective futures on.
“Fuck a duck.”
John might have left the chaos untouched and gone to sleep but he needed the place to be safe and relatively clean when Jake arrived. He had done his best to turn this lousy apartment into a home for them and he wasn’t going to let a flood undo that.
So, he removed his drenched socks, rolled his jeans up to his knees and, holding his breath and half praying to a God he half believed in, unplugged the stove. Then he gathered all of his extra sheets, every towel in the place and a few surprisingly absorbent sweaters to more or less soak the disaster up.
After loading as much of the mess that would fit into the washing machine—the apartment’s saving grace even if it did hook up to the kitchen sink—John sat on the couch and massaged what felt like a small boulder in the back of his neck. He thought he might kill for a drink, a great reminder of why there wasn’t any alcohol in the apartment.
The sound of the snow had changed. It was sleeting now, thousands of little balls pelting the ground. The wind was howling like a pack of wild dogs. Suddenly he remembered the woman, his own stray. She must have moved on by now, looking for a more attentive master.
She’s still out there.
He groaned. Nobody could stay out in that cold.
But she is.
He opened the door. She was exactly where he had left her. Her hatless head was covered with icy snow. She was still smiling at him.
John shut the door. He furtively gathered what little cash he had on hand. What else could she want? He took a deep breath and opened the door again.
“That’s all I have.”
John held out the money to her. His arm hung in space and after a few seconds, he felt a sudden, shameful pang and stuffed the rumpled bills and coins into his pocket.
Hail was melting in her hair and rivulets of water ran down both sides of her face like streams of tears.
He looked at her, more closely this time and realized what it was about her, apart from the fact that she had followed him home, that identified her as crazy, that had made everyone on the subway lean almost imperceptibly away from her as though they would be infected if she touched them. It was the belief that someone—one of these strangers—would be kind to her, would take care of her, would help her. It was hope and it radiated through her threadbare clothes like a beacon of abnormality and made her seem like an overgrown, mentally challenged child.
If you don’t let her in, she will die out here.
Not my problem.
Whose problem is it?
Her lips hadn’t stirred. The voice was in his head.
They looked at each other for a long time, and he shivered. He turned back and opened the door, let himself in and closed it behind him. He stood for a few seconds with his back against the door, listening to the rasping sound of his own breathing. He opened the door again. She was perfectly still, her expression fixed.
John let her in.
She was freezing. Water from her drenched clothes dripped onto his welcome mat. With all of his towels and extra bedding in the laundry, he didn’t know what to do about it.
Of course I don’t know what to do, I’ve lost my goddamned mind, he thought.
He supposed he could give her the sweater he had on, although the thought of it touching her twisted his guts. She stood uncomfortably close to him near the bottom of the stairs just as she had on the subway.
“One second, okay?”
John didn’t give her a chance to object. He went into the closet to get his winter coat for her, figuring it would probably be dry by now. As he pulled it out a sound emerged in his consciousness. Could those be bells? Maybe he really was losing it.
When he returned, he discovered that the woman had sat her sopping wet rear down on his couch and turned on the television to a choral performance of “Carol of the Bells”. So the sound had been real. He had endured more than enough seasonal noise pollution while shopping for Jake’s presents at the mall, but at least he wasn’t hearing things that weren’t there.
Ignoring an internal voice that warned him not to handle anything she had touched, he picked up the remote control and turned the sound down on Christmas.
“I’m going to call someone. Try to get you some help.”
Her expression still hadn’t changed. Her pupils were dilated.
“Do you have anyone you want me to try to reach for you?”
She said nothing.
“Good talk,” he said through gritted teeth. His question had been redundant, though. Surely, she didn’t have anyone. If she did, why would she be here?
John held his coat out to her, but she didn’t move. He reluctantly draped it over her, feeling an unpleasant frisson when his fingertips brushed up against her, even through the coat’s thick fabric. He retrieved a space heater from his bedroom, plugged it into an outlet and aimed it at her, leaving it close enough to warm her but far enough away from her dripping clothes that it wasn’t an electrical hazard, he hoped.
Weighing the equally unappealing prospects of talking on the phone about the woman in her presence and leaving her unattended, John decided to go to his bedroom.
Not knowing who else to call, he looked up a non-emergency number for the police and dialed it. The cop who answered sounded as happy to be taking his call as John was to be making it.
“This is 51 Division.”
“Hello officer. I, uh, I have a problem. That I need some… assistance with.”
John shook his head at his own awkwardness. What was he supposed to tell this guy?
The truth.
“Is this a criminal matter?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Probably not?”
The cop exhaled sharply.
“Then why are you calling the police, sir?”
John spit the whole story out quickly, not wanting to give the cop a chance to hang up on him. When he finished there was a long pause.
“So you let a complete stranger into your residence.”
John heard the volume on the television rise through the closed bedroom door. The choir had moved on to “O Holy Night”.
“Yes,” John answered, his voice echoing hollowly in his own head.
“Why?”
“What, I should have just left her out there to freeze to death?”
“Sir, if you talk to me in that tone, I’m going to end the call.”
John took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself. They had taught him that at the court-mandated anger management course.
“Listen, Officer…”
“My identification number is PP-6336, sir.”
“Okay, Officer PP-6336, I understand that you might have an opinion about the decision I made here but I’m, you know, just a citizen with a probably homeless, maybe crazy lady in my living room. Can you please help me?”
Officer PP-6336 sighed.
“I can give you a number for social services.”
“Great. That’s—”
“But they’re closed,” the cop interrupted. “They won’t be open until 10 am on Boxing Day—sir, will you please turn that down?”
The cop was right, the music had gotten intrusively loud. John felt a sudden, almost irresistible urge to scream and pound his head against the door and quickly moved to the other room, muting the television and leaving the remote on top of it, out of the woman’s reach. She still didn’t appear to have moved, and her smile remained as constant and mad as the Cheshire Cat’s.
When John returned to the bedroom his hands were trembling.
“Is that better, officer?”
“It’s fine.”
The cop sounded as if he had already moved on mentally to the next call. John needed to reach him, and he had to do it now.
“Officer, please. I can’t have her here overnight. My son is coming over to open presents tomorrow.”
John lowered his voice.
“What if she’s dangerous?”
He could hear papers shuffling on the other end of the line.
“What exactly do you want me to do here, sir?”
“Can you send a car to pick her up and let her stay at the station or something? Don’t you have a drunk tank?”
“Does she appear to be intoxicated?”
John hesitated.
“Yes,” he lied unconvincingly.
“What’s your name, sir?”
“John. John Patrick Moss, officer.”
“Mr. Moss, I’m going to level with you. We have no room to house anyone at the station and regardless, we could only do that if this woman had committed a crime. You could call an ambulance, but they won’t come because she’s not experiencing a health emergency. If she was outside and in distress maybe they would get her but she’s not. You could call a taxi to take her to a shelter but all the beds in the shelters are occupied. They always are in weather like this. As far as the law is concerned, this woman is your guest. If you want her to leave and she refuses to, I can send an officer to make her go but I can’t honestly say where she’ll end up.”
Officer PP-6336’s tone had softened. For the first time he sounded to John like a person and not a brusquely hostile android.
“I wish I could help you, John. Her too. But I can’t. Good luck.”
“I understand, officer.”
And he did. It was ruthless, inhumane logic that left him in impossible and absurd circumstances, but he did.
“Merry Christmas,” Officer PP-6336 said, and John’s phone went quiet.
When he slunk back into the living room, John found the woman’s fixed grin and glazed eyes still aimed at the silenced choir on the television. Were they going to be performing all night?
He forced himself to sit down on a chair and look directly at her. Clots of her thawing hair hung down the sides of her face like wilting vines.
“Ma’am, we need to talk. I just spoke to the poli—to someone and it looks like no one can help you tonight. Now, you can stay on that couch, but I have to go before noon tomorrow and you need to leave when I do. The weather will be better by then.”
Would it be? John had no idea but there was no way in hell he was going to leave her here on her own.
“Okay?”
The woman stared straight ahead.
John imagined grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking the frozen smile off her flushed, immobile face. He leaned forward instead and pressed his palms against his forehead.
“I know you can talk. You said something to me on the subway.”
Silence.
“Can you please show that you hear me? How about you nod? Just nod your head if you understand what I’m saying to you.”
The woman remained as still and mute as an exceptionally disciplined artist’s model. Whatever had animated her before seemed to have gone completely. Looking at her was like gazing through a broken window into an abandoned, derelict house. Or, perhaps more accurately, a haunted one.
Outside the apartment, the wind screeched.
John almost tripped hurrying off the chair and onto his feet.
“That’s the bathroom.”
He waved his arms vaguely, a gesture that felt as futile as it did ridiculous.
“Well, goodnight.”
On his way through the kitchen, John took the big carving knife from the drawer, paused, and then gathered all the other sharp knives, a pair of scissors, and some disposable razors from the bathroom. He felt ridiculous hiding this pile of potential weaponry under his bed, but it was better than imagining the woman getting at it. He kept remembering more household items that could be used for violent ends—the baseball bat in the closet, the hammer in the toolbox, the bleach under the bathroom sink—but to reach them he would have to cross in front of her again and he did not want to do that. The truth was, as Jake would say, she creeped him out bigtime.
As he lay in bed his thoughts tore at him like a hungry dog worrying a bone. Why hadn’t he installed a lock on the bedroom door? Why had he put himself in this position? What was wrong with him? Somehow things had acquired a momentum of their own and here he was, about to have a sleepover with a seemingly catatonic indigent. Seemingly is the key word there, a primitive part of his brain yammered. She moved pretty damned quickly when she was stalking you outside. What if she’s pretending? Waiting for you to let your guard down and then—
John jolted at the sound of voices in the other room. Had the woman let someone into the apartment? His body stiffened and his heart hammered until he realized what he was hearing was that infernal choir singing “Silent Night”. So she had merely turned the volume on the television up yet again. His relief was tempered by the thought of the remote control that he had left on top of the television. There was no way she could have reached it without leaving the couch. She must be moving around out there.
He considered going to the living room to check on her but decided to barricade the door from the inside instead. John angled a chair so its back rested under the doorknob and spread out some of Jake’s Hot Wheels and a toy xylophone on the floor around it. Even if the woman somehow managed to open the door, he would hear her entering the bedroom.
A reasonable sounding voice spoke up from somewhere inside him.
Get it together, man, Look at yourself. I mean really, look at yourself. You’re making traps and hiding under the covers from a harmless old woman.
But was she really harmless? Why did the hairs on his neck bristle when he imagined her in the other room grinning away, doing God knew what?
John tossed and turned in his bed, but the day had been punishingly long, and he was so very tired. He finally lay on his side and fell asleep to the muffled sound of the choir singing “Ave Maria”.
In his dream, John was back in the Sacred Heart church rectory where he had grudgingly taken his confirmation classes. The priest, Father Billy Norton—fifteen years dead—was acting out the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac with the same ghoulish, drunken enthusiasm he had when John had been in the eighth grade. The only differences were that Father Billy’s bloodshot blue eyes were now bright silver and that John was the lone student in the class. He was seated right at the front, directly below the ranting priest in the same unfortunate spot where Lex Legare had once absorbed a sickening amount of Norton’s whiskey-inflected saliva.
“Where’s the lamb, Daddy!? Where’s the lamb?” Norton as Isaac entreated.
John suddenly felt a blazing hot sun beating down on the back of his neck. He looked around and saw that he was dangerously close to the precipice of what must have been a mountain. Jake, dressed in a robe and bound to a black rock with rope, looked up at him with awful, complete trust. John noticed that he was holding a curved dagger high above his head. He tried to lower the blade but couldn’t move.
“Where is the lamb?” Jake asked him.
“God will provide,” John answered in a voice that was not his own and as the knife plunged at Jake’s throat, he woke up screaming.
He lay panting in darkness, his face wet with tears. For a moment he was grateful to feel the familiar terra of his bed but somehow it seemed smaller and more cramped than it should have. He started to stretch out but what he felt then froze him in place. Someone was in there with him.
He didn’t need light to know what had happened. It had been a while, but he still remembered how it felt to have a naked woman spoon against his back. How had she gotten in there without waking him? Her leg was draped over the side of his hip, pinning him down. Her soft bare breasts pressed into his spine. To his horror, he felt himself getting hard.
John tried to free himself, but her arm shot out snake-like and wrapped around his waist. He struggled but her grip was shockingly strong. He opened his mouth to scream and she shoved her fingers into it, gagging him. She forced him onto his back and straddled him as he thrashed as fruitlessly as a midge in a spiderweb.
He bit at her fingers, but it was like trying to contain a wave of rapidly rising dough. Her hand was expanding, filling his mouth and invading his throat. He was choking on her.
As she leaned down, John felt the rest of her body spreading out amorphously over him, covering him like a suffocating, gelatinous wave. She was merging with him, assimilating him into her.
Fireworks went off in his oxygen-starved brain as she whispered wetly into his ear with the passion of a devotee, “You are wonderful.”
He lay helplessly still as her tongue probed his eardrum like an insistent worm and her guttural voice transformed into a piercing, insectile buzz.
The droning went on for almost a full minute before John realized that it was the alarm on his phone. He shivered as the sweat that soaked his sheets began to evaporate and took a few seconds to orient himself, touching first the rest of the bed to make sure he was alone in it and then his body to reassure him that he was still whole.
It had been by far the worst and most vivid dream he had ever had. He momentarily allowed himself to hope that his entire encounter with the woman had been a part of the same dark dream. After all, it had been charged with a similar, surreal intensity.
But when he turned the phone’s alarm off and heard the choir from the other room singing “Angels We Have Heard on High”—surely these couldn’t still be the same singers—he knew that the waking part of this nightmare was far from over.
The first thing he noticed when he walked into the living room was that the remote control was on top of the television, exactly where he had left it. This filled him with an irrational but undeniably strong sense that somehow the volume of the choir had risen without the woman handling the remote or stirring from the couch at all. The second thing he noticed was the smell.
The stench emanating from her was vile. She smelled like his mother’s excretions had when she was dying in hospice with a belly full of cancer. His stomach dropped when he saw dark liquid soaking through his coat and pooling at the woman’s feet.
She didn’t look good either. Not good at all.
Open, running sores dotted her cheeks and her skin hung loosely from her face in folds. Blue-black craters had spread under her sunken eyes. When he looked more closely at her vacuous smile, he saw that some of her teeth had fallen out. If he had only sensed it before, it was obvious now that something was terribly wrong with her.
She’s dying.
No. She wasn’t. She couldn’t be. He was due to pick up Jake any minute and she simply could not be here when he brought him back. Not a chance. So she was unwell mentally. So she was sick. So she was in a bit of a bad way. It probably looked a lot worse than it was. He had let her come in out of the storm. He had let her stay at his place. What else could he be expected to do? How much was enough? It was time for her to go.
John didn’t bother speaking to her this time. There was no time and no reason for social graces. He knew she either wouldn’t or couldn’t respond. He pushed through a visceral sense of disgust and tried to move her from the couch but was stunned by how heavy and solid she was. When he squatted down for leverage and attempted to lift her, she toppled forward bonelessly, sending him sprawling onto his back. She made no effort to break her fall and her face smashed into the coffee table with a sickening thud.
Unleashing a continuous, almost perfectly balanced wave of prayer and profanity, John struggled to his feet and managed to restore the woman to something approximating her previous position on the couch. When he saw the state of her face, his stomach lurched. Her dented nose gushed blood. Pus from the yawning lesions smeared her cheeks. Horribly, she was still smiling.
John reached for his cell phone to dial 911 and discovered a text from Petra, his ex-wife.
Are you almost here? Jake is waiting.
As he was reading the message another one appeared.
Earth to John!!! Hello!???!??!
He raised the phone to call her then hesitated. What was he going to tell her? The truth? He couldn’t, at least not if he had any hope of bringing Jake over to open the presents sitting under the tiny, artificial tree. However compassionate Petra—who had grown up in Malibu and attended boarding school in Switzerland—might imagine herself to be, he couldn’t see her handing over Jake to spend Christmas Day with any homeless person, let alone one who was dripping blood onto the carpet and grinning like Nosferatu.
No, he would call to apologize for being late and say nothing about the woman, only that he was on his way. He would pick Jake up and prepare him for seeing her—as much as he could anyway—on the way home, and then call an ambulance for her. He had settled on the apartment specifically because it was so close to the house that he and Petra had once shared and if he hustled there, he should be able to make it back in fifteen minutes. But first he needed to do something about the woman’s face, to mitigate how traumatic her visage would be for Jake as much as to assuage his guilt for leaving her in this condition.
Before he did that though, he would get her some water. He could at least do that for her. He filled a glass at the kitchen sink and willed himself to get close enough to her to reach her mouth.
“Here’s a drink for you, okay?”
His voice sounded strange and tinny to him, a lost recording from an extinct civilization.
As fast as he poured the water it drooled out of her red, broken mouth and onto her lap.
He went back to the sink, dampened a clean sponge and wetted her chapped, cracked lips then retrieved a fresh roll of toilet paper from the bathroom to stanch her bleeding nose. When he wound it around her head, carefully breathing through his mouth, the toilet paper clung to her ruined face like sticky gauze. She looked like a demented grandmother ready to hand out Halloween candy in a low-budget but effectively gruesome mummy costume. At the thought of this, John restrained an unhinged laugh.
He put on his boots then took a couple of sweaters from the dryer to wear. They wouldn’t make up for the loss of his jacket but hopefully they would help him tolerate the cold for the short time he would have to be out in it.
When he dialed her number, Petra answered her phone on the first ring. Before she spoke, she uttered a sigh of such withering contempt that he immediately cursed himself for calling in the first place.
“What?”
His intention to apologize shrank in the biting cold of her hostility.
“I’m running behind. Leaving now.”
“You haven’t even left yet?”
“What did I just—”
“Don’t start with me, John,” she said.
He bit his lip hard, took a deep breath and then another one. He had to keep it together. A shouting match on the phone was not going to facilitate his Christmas with Jake.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Petra. Really. I mean it,” he said.
The silence that followed gave him a moment of hope until it was punctured by a raw, ragged bellow that could only have had one source.
“You are terrific!”
When John tried to speak, his mouth opened and closed as silently and mindlessly as a fish’s. Was it possible that Petra hadn’t heard it? Maybe it had sounded exaggeratedly loud to him.
“Was that a woman, John? Do you have someone over there?”
“I can explain…”
“Go to hell.”
He heard himself asking her to wait but he was talking into a void. She had hung up on him.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” John said.
He looked at the woman’s toilet paper covered face—still and vacant as a waxwork now, of course—and once more fought the impulse to laugh. He was starting to feel like the victim of some kind of absurd, cosmic prank show.
But who was the host? Who or what might be crouching behind the curtain or watching through the hidden camera, preparing to reveal itself.
It’s time to go.
Yes, it was. Jake was waiting for him.
John’s father had been a ghost in his own home, absent even during the rare times he was around, translucent long before he disappeared completely.
When Jake was born, John had vowed that he would not repeat this pattern, that he would always be there for his son. Yes, he had let him down by torching his already failing marriage in a weeklong bender that culminated in sex with three different women on three consecutive nights. But he was trying. He hadn’t had a drink or seen a woman since the breakup. He had given up his financial interest in the house in exchange for shared custody. Whatever happened, he needed Jake to know that his father had shown up for him.
He took out a garbage bag from under the sink and piled the presents into it. Petra might not let him bring Jake home after what she had heard on the phone and as the seemingly indefatigable TV choir sang “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and he saw the blood soaking through the toilet paper on the woman’s face, it was impossible not to think that might be for the best. But if he couldn’t take Jake home for Christmas then he would bring Christmas to Jake.
On his way to the door, he hesitated. Had something shifted in the woman’s face?
He bent down as close to her as he could stand to.
“I don’t know if you’re in there or not but in case you can hear me, I need to go see my son. It’s Christmas Day and I made him a promise.”
She stared through him blankly and he felt as foolish as a man caught tossing coins into a wishing well and waiting for a receipt.
“I’ll come back soon and when I do, I will get you help. That’s a promise too.”
Her gaze was an abyss. His words disappeared into it like a thimble full of luminescent water in a sea of darkness.
Before he left the apartment, he cupped the Kinder Surprise Egg—Jake’s special treat—in his palm as gently as if it were a small animal.
John knew something was wrong as soon as he stepped outside. The snow had finally stopped but if anything, it was colder. Everything was covered in a layer of ice. The sharp, chlorine smell of ozone permeated the air, as if an electrical storm was impending, but the air itself was abnormally still. A siren blared in the distance. Worst of all, a third of the sky was an unnatural looking purplish black.
The streets were empty, which he supposed was typical for Christmas morning, but as he made his way to Petra’s—stepping gingerly over the icy sidewalk in spite of the thick treads on his winter boots—he saw that all the decorative seasonal lights on the houses he was passing had gone dark. The bleakness of the overall effect was only enhanced by the rising sound of the siren as he neared Petra’s house. As determined as he was to see Jake, it was difficult for him not to flee back to his apartment.
She’s waiting for you.
He found the siren’s source just fifty feet from Petra’s front door. An ambulance was parked at a jagged angle in the middle of the street, its emergency lights reflecting off the surrounding ice. There was no sign of a driver. Its rear doors were open and an empty stretcher lay on the street in front of them. A pair of black boots rested in the snow near the stretcher. They were still laced up. For some reason, John thought of fossilized dinosaur remains preserved in a tar pit.
What is happening here?
He didn’t have time to think about it. He was beginning to get the sense that he might not have much time at all.
When he rang her doorbell, after a delay long enough to seem intentional, Petra opened the door just far enough that he could see a fraction of her face. She didn’t unlatch the door chain. Her gaze moved down to the garbage bag he was carrying.
“I don’t want your trash, John. Bring it back to your new friend.”
“Petra—”
“Why are you here? You’re not bringing Jake home to some stranger. Or have you introduced him to her already? We agreed to talk about that first.”
He tried to keep his voice calm and measured but the fact that he had to raise it to be heard over the abandoned ambulance’s siren worked against him.
“I don’t even know who she is. She followed me home from the subway. She’s old and sick and probably homeless. I was trying to help her.”
“Did you fuck her?”
“No! Did you hear what I just said?”
“So why didn’t you tell me all that when you called?”
He hesitated.
“I thought you wouldn’t believe me,” he said.
“I don’t believe you.”
After all the lies he had told her, why would she?
“Can I come in? We can watch Jake open the presents together and then I’ll leave. Just give me half an hour.”
“No.”
“Petra, please.”
“No!”
For a moment his desperation tipped into black rage and he imagined slamming his shoulder into the door and breaking the chain. It wasn’t strong enough to keep him out if he decided to come in and the stark truth was neither was she.
He took a step back for leverage but then his vision was drawn upwards and he saw Jake in his Tyrannosaurus rex pajamas, tapping at the glass of his second-floor bedroom window. It didn’t seem possible that John could have heard him but somehow he had sensed him there. When they made eye contact, Jake smiled and waved. John waved back at him and his brittle fury broke like a thin, dry twig damming over a boundless wave of grief.
Now, when he thought of kicking the door until the chain broke, forcing his way into the house, he could only envision the resultant fear and confusion on Jake’s face. He took a deep breath and looked back at Petra. Her one eye that was visible to him through the crack in the door was bulging and there was too much white in it. She was angry, yes, but underneath that she was terrified. Was she really so frightened of him, or could she feel on some level that something was cataclysmically wrong out here?
In the end, did it matter?
He laid down the garbage bag full of presents on the welcome mat they had chosen together—“It’s Good to be Home” was written on it in folksy cursive—and held out the Kinder Surprise Egg to her.
He nodded slowly.
“Please tell Jake that I love him.” He needed a few seconds before he could continue. “So much. And that I’m sorry.”
His capitulation disarmed her. She made no move to open the chain, but her lip trembled and she took the egg from him.
He looked back up at Jake and blew him a kiss. Jake returned it and waved again, his smile turning pensive.
John wheeled around and walked away as quickly as he could on the slippery sidewalk. He needed to go right now or he thought he might lie down on the ground outside the house and not get back up.
He felt tears freezing in his eyelashes as he headed back in the direction of the apartment. He had left him there. His boy. Jake wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on, just that Daddy had come like he said he would but had left without explanation, without even giving him a hug.
Even if that was true, it was better than him seeing his parents tear each other apart, the way they had done for most of his short life.
The streets were desolate. Snow had begun to fall again. It pricked his skin like tiny shards of frozen glass. He looked up and saw that the discoloured part of the sky had turned even darker shades of black and purple, like a rapidly worsening bruise. The sound of several other sirens had joined the original one, forming a blaring chorus. John shivered as he felt the temperature drop lower still and was struck by the thought that this cold was originating from inside him. He imagined a snow globe that contained everything he was seeing and spotted himself, a lone, tiny speck moving around inside it. When a proportionately enormous hand dropped the globe and it smashed, he felt nothing but relief.
Through the gloom he saw the liquor store’s sign emerge like a beacon and swerved towards it swiftly and instinctively. The store’s windows had been smashed and it had already been ransacked, but there was still plenty left to go around. He picked up the bottle of whiskey and it felt like home.
He aimed himself at the apartment because he had nowhere else to go. As he walked, a feeling rose in him of being pursued, similar to what he had felt when the woman had followed him home but much stronger and more concentrated, like the difference between the silhouette of a thing and the thing itself. He turned around quickly but the street behind him was empty. When he faced forward again, however, a large shape was advancing towards him with chilling speed. He cringed away, almost slipping on the ice, but managed to steady himself. The thing stopped moving and his eyes were able to translate its shape into something concrete if contextually bizarre. It was a huge, riderless pale horse, staring wild-eyed in his direction. Its nostrils flared and it reared back and whinnied. It had no saddle, but for a moment he thought he saw something made of shadow capering on its back. Then, as suddenly as the beast had appeared, it galloped away into the falling snow and was gone.
Something behind John’s eyes throbbed. Had the creature escaped from a Mountie? He imagined a pair of distinctively high boots sitting in the snow, like the pair he had seen near the ambulance. But where was the saddle? And what was that thing he had seen on its back, flickering like an old projection of a black and white movie?
These questions just made his head hurt worse. There were no satisfactory answers to them. He was holding the only satisfactory answer to anything ever in a bottle in his hand. He would have opened it now and drowned himself in it, but he found that his fingers were too cold to move.
He needed to get inside and get this whiskey inside him, but he couldn’t feel his extremities. With great effort, he started moving again. That uncanny and pervasive sense of being followed hadn’t left with the horse, though. He kept looking behind him but whoever or whatever was coming after him—if anything was—remained elusive.
The only time he slowed his pace was when he saw something that he thought at first was a remarkably lifelike ice sculpture of a human body. It was on its hands and knees on someone’s lawn, in front of a Christmas display of Santa’s sleigh being pulled by his reindeer. On closer examination, the figure revealed itself to be an actual old man frozen under a thin layer of ice. The man’s coat was threadbare—it barely looked warm enough for fall—and he had tied plastic bags over his feet, to try to keep the snow out. His eyes were open, milky white and utterly empty. John turned away and moved faster, the sound of his own panting breaths rattling in his ears. When he saw the apartment, he somehow found the strength to run. The last thing he heard before his stiff, freezing fingers managed to unlock the door was the growl of an animal far too large and wild to be found in a city.
Any relief he might have felt at escaping whatever was going on outside was snuffed out instantly by the wave of scent that crashed over him in the apartment. The stench of rot and disease that had been radiating off the woman earlier was still there, but it was only a minor accent to what was now an overwhelming, coppery reek. It smelled like an animal’s cave at the end of winter.
Though the power was out everywhere, somehow the TV choir was still going strong, saving his least favourite hymn of all—“The Little Drummer Boy”—for the worst possible moment. The flickering lights from the TV provided scant illumination, but he didn’t need to see well to know what the flood of liquid covering the floor and coating the walls was. Something inside the woman must have hemorrhaged.
He knew she was dead without looking at her. No one could bleed that much and live. Besides, he could feel her absence in his viscera. It dominated the atmospheric landscape of the apartment like a painting composed almost entirely of negative space.
Look at her.
Hell no. He wasn’t going to look at her. She was dead and gone. The only thing he was going to look at was the bottle in his hand. His eyes focused on its red label. He would drink it down until he couldn’t see anything at all. He wondered distantly if he would be able to get it all in without throwing up.
You made a promise.
But what was one more broken promise, really? What was one more piece of trash added to the landfill? No one was watching. No one cared. What did it fucking matter?
But it does.
When he had gone to the court-mandated AA meetings, the former army sergeant running them had talked about the difference between pain and suffering, how pain was merely sensation and suffering was the story you told yourself about the pain. How pain was finite but suffering could go on forever in the psyche and was thus unendurable. So what was the answer to suffering? The same as the answer to everything in those meetings: follow the steps.
Listening to other people’s stories of degradation and loss at those meetings had helped him, but the steps had left him cold. Step three was the real asskicker. How could he make a decision to turn his will and life over to the care of God as he understood Him when he deeply, profoundly didn’t understand Him? When he vacillated between not believing in Him at all and being enraged at Him for the state of the world. How could he take a leap of faith when what he saw all around him and especially in the mirror gave him no reason to hold that faith?
But as that insistent voice had reminded him (whose voice?), he had made a promise. No more numbing. No more hiding. No more self-annihilation. As painful as life might be, as painful as he might make it for himself, he would stay conscious for it. But how naive he had been. How could he have known what he was promising?
Just half the bottle, just a swallow, one little sip, what could it hurt, what difference would it make, who would even know, oh God it hurts, I can’t do it on my own, oh dear God help me—
Howling, he heaved the bottle against the wall with the last ounce of his strength and it shattered. The grainy, yeasty smell of whiskey covered the scent of blood and the dead woman’s stink. Saliva squirted in his mouth. When he looked at the wet, glinting splinters of glass on the carpet he wanted so badly to crawl over to them on the floor and lick at them that he could taste the intermingled alcohol and blood from his lacerated tongue. Instead, he made himself look directly at the woman.
She was a shell now, a ravaged simulacrum of a human body. Mercifully, her head had slumped forward onto her chest, hiding her eyes and making her resemble a sleeping child. In death, her smile looked more peaceful and less hungry. He stunned himself by going to her, reaching out and embracing her gently. She was cool to the touch. He heard something over the TV choir’s pa rum pum pum pum’s and realized it was the sound of his own wretched tears. His body was wracked with sobs. The world had reduced this woman to zero. No one had loved her or cared about her. She mattered so little that she had become invisible. Then she had come to him for help and he had left her to die alone. His grief was oceanic. It washed away his disgust, judgment and fear all at once. It felt like it would rend him into minute fragments but somehow his form held together.
He tenderly brushed at hair that was glued to her face with blood then hugged her harder—and felt something inside her move. He lurched away from her. She had felt so cold. Could her heart still be beating? He lifted her head to see if she was breathing and when his thumb pressed against the side of her cheek it met no resistance at all and slid right into it. Whatever was under her skin was hideously warm. John shrieked and withdrew his hand as if it had been scalded then watched as her face collapsed in on itself like a disintegrating souffle. He thought of Jake’s Kinder Surprise, the chocolate surrounding it crumbling away from the yellow plastic receptacle that held its true nature.
He staggered backwards as her body began to vibrate, and with a sound like fabric ripping, her skin split and started sloughing off. Glowing white, membranous wings emerged through the torn skin on her back and shoulders.
The choir started to sing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and he thought helplessly of the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, of George Bailey, his life redeemed, surrounded by the friends and family he hadn’t realized he had meant so much to, of Zuzu’s petals and her high, little girl’s voice saying, “Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”
The rest of the woman’s skin fell to the floor like discarded wrapping paper as the creature that had nested within it fully appeared. Its skin shone so brightly that John was forced to squint as its wings spread out to the width of the living room.
He looked into its terrible, beautiful face and his eyes melted into liquid that dripped down his cheeks like candle wax. Somehow, in the dark, he still sensed the light that the being was generating and felt the scorching heat, which increased tenfold as it reached out to him. His skin crackled as it touched him.
The chorus of sirens was louder now, drowning out the choir, joined by what sounded like a thousand trumpets blasting through a megaphone. In the midst of the cacophony, he heard something roaring and the distant sound of people screaming.
His sightless eyes saw Jake waving from Petra’s upstairs window, and he wished he had been able to touch him once more, to ruffle his hair, to lift him in his arms and kiss him; to say goodbye.
The creature put its blazing arms around him in an encompassing embrace. He didn’t know what would happen next, whether a beam of light would carry him off somewhere beyond pain, or this emissary would spirit him away and drop him into a lake of fire, or if he would just end, like a star in the night sky winking out forever. He supposed it didn’t matter. He was in the hands of a higher power.
John surrendered.
As a playwright, Wes Berger has had his plays You Are Here, Desert Places, Fool and First Dates produced at various festivals in his home city of Toronto. He has directed these and several other works for the theatre, including five first productions of plays by award-winning Canadian playwright George F. Walker, and The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh. As an actor on film and television for over twenty years, he has appeared in everything from a Marvel movie (The Incredible Hulk) to The Handmaid’s Tale. He co-wrote and acted in Happy Families, an independent feature film currently in post-production. The COVID pandemic inspired Wes to follow his lifelong dream of writing horror fiction, of which he has been a devoted fan since, as a child, he sneaked his mother’s forbidden copy of Stephen King’s It out of a closet in 1986. “Stray” is his first published short story. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and is the father of three wonderful children.
“Stray” by Wes Berger. Copyright © 2025 by Wes Berger.
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John couldn't have said exactly why he did it. She didn’t look that old, maybe in her late fifties. She didn’t seem to be struggling to stay on her feet. But when he noticed her get up and let the authentically old lady take her seat, he was standing before he had time to think about it and by then it was too late.
“Would you like to sit?”
She turned her head and her eyes blazed right into him with discomfiting intensity. He instantly wished he had stayed seated.
“What a gentleman!”
The subway car was crowded, especially for this time of night. There had been some sort of service delay. Everyone had waited longer than usual for the train and a collective, low-grade hostility permeated the atmosphere inside. The riders pressed involuntarily against each other with every lurch and acceleration, glaring and grunting like penned animals as she pushed through them to where John had been sitting. She leaned in too close to him.
“Thank you.”
Her voice was loud in the enclosed space. Suddenly the train seemed oddly quiet. John nodded in her direction then turned aside, but she wasn’t done with him yet.
“Thank you, sir.”
He felt her breath, hot on his neck, and mumbled something inaudible. He didn’t look back at her. The last thing he wanted now was to make eye contact.
“You are a wonderful man.”
He tried to move further away from her but there was nowhere to go. He was trapped. They were becoming a spectacle. He sensed as much as saw the smirks and sideways glances, full of commingled empathy and scorn.
The few minutes it took for the train to arrive at his stop were interminable. He did his best to make himself invisible but was certain that the woman’s eyes never left him. As the train ground to a halt, he put his head down and shoved his way through the mass of protesting bodies to the opening door. As he crossed the threshold he turned back briefly and saw, without surprise, that she had risen and was heading towards the exit. No one was moving for her. It didn’t look like she would make it.
John hit the stairs at a jog. He might have felt like he had aged ten years in the last two, but he was still just 33, relatively young and fit and he wanted to get home (away from her) as quickly as he could.
The cold hit him as soon as he left the station and he put on his hat and gloves. It had started to snow. Delicate white tendrils hung in the air, soon to become brown muck clogging the city’s busy streets, sprayed onto pedestrians by oblivious drivers. John used to love the snow. Now he tolerated it because Jake loved it. Jake was nearly four and he thought snow was about the greatest thing in the world, after dinosaurs and great white sharks. His beautiful son. The flower that had bloomed, like a miracle, out of his garbage dump of a marriage.
Thinking about Jake reminded him that he had no food at the apartment, and he stopped at a 7-11 to pick up milk, juice, cereal and canned soup. Everything was marked up in price of course, but nothing else was open now and nothing at all would be open tomorrow. He needed something to feed Jake after he picked him up from his ex-wife’s to spend his court-approved portion of Christmas Day with him. At least he had already bought presents, although they had pushed his straining credit card to its limit.
At the checkout counter he added a Kinder Surprise Egg for a treat. Jake was crazy about those things. He liked assembling the little toy that came inside the plastic bubble even more than he liked eating the chocolate shell. Now that he was past the age where he might have swallowed one of the tiny parts, John had no objection.
When he left the store, a chill wind nipped at his face and thick snowflakes covered his eyelids. He tucked his chin into his jacket and plowed forward, grateful that his apartment, though it was a mouse-plagued basement, was only a few minutes away. Halfway there, he slowed down, struck by a hazy sense of portent. Had he forgotten something at the store? He didn’t think so but reached down to check the bags and make sure.
He felt her before he saw her. It was the woman from the subway. She was right behind him. She had made it out at his stop after all.
John moved quickly, wanting to put space between them. She was probably just some harmless nut, but being followed was an eerie sensation and the last damned thing he needed after sitting in a cubicle for ten hours straight on Christmas Eve.
She was deceptively fast. Once in a while he looked back, but no matter how much he increased his pace she never seemed to be further than twenty steps away.
When he reached his apartment door, John turned around to face her. By the time he could get it unlocked she might catch up with him, and he didn’t want that happening while his back was turned.
She stopped on the sidewalk, and they looked at each other. John could hear his own harsh breathing, but the woman didn’t seem adversely affected by their walking race. She wasn’t wearing a hat, and snowflakes dotted her dark grey hair. She was smiling at him. It was a dazzler of a smile and made her look ten years younger. She looked far too happy to see him, for his liking.
“What do you want?”
The smile only grew wider. Her teeth looked unusually big in relation to the size of her mouth.
“Look, I don’t have time for this.”
John couldn’t meet her eyes any longer.
“I can’t help you.”
He turned away and started to unlock the door. He wasn’t going to let this troubled woman and his own vague feeling of guilt hold him hostage here all night.
He fumbled with his keys and tried to pretend that his shaky hands were a result of the cold. Once, against his will, he looked back to make sure the woman wasn’t approaching him, and there she was. Still standing on the sidewalk. Still smiling at him.
After John had locked the door behind him, the whole thing seemed so ridiculous that he almost laughed, would have laughed, in fact, if a single thought hadn’t been resonating at the bottom of his consciousness: she knows where I live. He remembered a Bible story where people’s doors had been marked to set them apart for the Angel of Death. But had those with marked doors been spared or taken?
His grim reverie was broken when he stepped into the kitchen to see if there was anything edible in his fridge and put his socked foot down into what must have been an inch of freezing water. The apartment had flooded. Again.
“Fuck me.”
He considered calling his landlady and her socially awkward son to tell them. On the plus side they would probably come downstairs and give him a few towels he could use to soak up the water. More than outweighing that, he thought, was the likelihood that the son would spend the rest of the night standing at the top of his stairs while he cleaned up the mess, apologizing that they hadn’t yet had someone over to clear the snow off the roof as promised and trying to sell him on a pyramid scheme that he and his mother had apparently staked their collective futures on.
“Fuck a duck.”
John might have left the chaos untouched and gone to sleep but he needed the place to be safe and relatively clean when Jake arrived. He had done his best to turn this lousy apartment into a home for them and he wasn’t going to let a flood undo that.
So, he removed his drenched socks, rolled his jeans up to his knees and, holding his breath and half praying to a God he half believed in, unplugged the stove. Then he gathered all of his extra sheets, every towel in the place and a few surprisingly absorbent sweaters to more or less soak the disaster up.
After loading as much of the mess that would fit into the washing machine—the apartment’s saving grace even if it did hook up to the kitchen sink—John sat on the couch and massaged what felt like a small boulder in the back of his neck. He thought he might kill for a drink, a great reminder of why there wasn’t any alcohol in the apartment.
The sound of the snow had changed. It was sleeting now, thousands of little balls pelting the ground. The wind was howling like a pack of wild dogs. Suddenly he remembered the woman, his own stray. She must have moved on by now, looking for a more attentive master.
She’s still out there.
He groaned. Nobody could stay out in that cold.
But she is.
He opened the door. She was exactly where he had left her. Her hatless head was covered with icy snow. She was still smiling at him.
John shut the door. He furtively gathered what little cash he had on hand. What else could she want? He took a deep breath and opened the door again.
“That’s all I have.”
John held out the money to her. His arm hung in space and after a few seconds, he felt a sudden, shameful pang and stuffed the rumpled bills and coins into his pocket.
Hail was melting in her hair and rivulets of water ran down both sides of her face like streams of tears.
He looked at her, more closely this time and realized what it was about her, apart from the fact that she had followed him home, that identified her as crazy, that had made everyone on the subway lean almost imperceptibly away from her as though they would be infected if she touched them. It was the belief that someone—one of these strangers—would be kind to her, would take care of her, would help her. It was hope and it radiated through her threadbare clothes like a beacon of abnormality and made her seem like an overgrown, mentally challenged child.
If you don’t let her in, she will die out here.
Not my problem.
Whose problem is it?
Her lips hadn’t stirred. The voice was in his head.
They looked at each other for a long time, and he shivered. He turned back and opened the door, let himself in and closed it behind him. He stood for a few seconds with his back against the door, listening to the rasping sound of his own breathing. He opened the door again. She was perfectly still, her expression fixed.
John let her in.
She was freezing. Water from her drenched clothes dripped onto his welcome mat. With all of his towels and extra bedding in the laundry, he didn’t know what to do about it.
Of course I don’t know what to do, I’ve lost my goddamned mind, he thought.
He supposed he could give her the sweater he had on, although the thought of it touching her twisted his guts. She stood uncomfortably close to him near the bottom of the stairs just as she had on the subway.
“One second, okay?”
John didn’t give her a chance to object. He went into the closet to get his winter coat for her, figuring it would probably be dry by now. As he pulled it out a sound emerged in his consciousness. Could those be bells? Maybe he really was losing it.
When he returned, he discovered that the woman had sat her sopping wet rear down on his couch and turned on the television to a choral performance of “Carol of the Bells”. So the sound had been real. He had endured more than enough seasonal noise pollution while shopping for Jake’s presents at the mall, but at least he wasn’t hearing things that weren’t there.
Ignoring an internal voice that warned him not to handle anything she had touched, he picked up the remote control and turned the sound down on Christmas.
“I’m going to call someone. Try to get you some help.”
Her expression still hadn’t changed. Her pupils were dilated.
“Do you have anyone you want me to try to reach for you?”
She said nothing.
“Good talk,” he said through gritted teeth. His question had been redundant, though. Surely, she didn’t have anyone. If she did, why would she be here?
John held his coat out to her, but she didn’t move. He reluctantly draped it over her, feeling an unpleasant frisson when his fingertips brushed up against her, even through the coat’s thick fabric. He retrieved a space heater from his bedroom, plugged it into an outlet and aimed it at her, leaving it close enough to warm her but far enough away from her dripping clothes that it wasn’t an electrical hazard, he hoped.
Weighing the equally unappealing prospects of talking on the phone about the woman in her presence and leaving her unattended, John decided to go to his bedroom.
Not knowing who else to call, he looked up a non-emergency number for the police and dialed it. The cop who answered sounded as happy to be taking his call as John was to be making it.
“This is 51 Division.”
“Hello officer. I, uh, I have a problem. That I need some… assistance with.”
John shook his head at his own awkwardness. What was he supposed to tell this guy?
The truth.
“Is this a criminal matter?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Probably not?”
The cop exhaled sharply.
“Then why are you calling the police, sir?”
John spit the whole story out quickly, not wanting to give the cop a chance to hang up on him. When he finished there was a long pause.
“So you let a complete stranger into your residence.”
John heard the volume on the television rise through the closed bedroom door. The choir had moved on to “O Holy Night”.
“Yes,” John answered, his voice echoing hollowly in his own head.
“Why?”
“What, I should have just left her out there to freeze to death?”
“Sir, if you talk to me in that tone, I’m going to end the call.”
John took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself. They had taught him that at the court-mandated anger management course.
“Listen, Officer…”
“My identification number is PP-6336, sir.”
“Okay, Officer PP-6336, I understand that you might have an opinion about the decision I made here but I’m, you know, just a citizen with a probably homeless, maybe crazy lady in my living room. Can you please help me?”
Officer PP-6336 sighed.
“I can give you a number for social services.”
“Great. That’s—”
“But they’re closed,” the cop interrupted. “They won’t be open until 10 am on Boxing Day—sir, will you please turn that down?”
The cop was right, the music had gotten intrusively loud. John felt a sudden, almost irresistible urge to scream and pound his head against the door and quickly moved to the other room, muting the television and leaving the remote on top of it, out of the woman’s reach. She still didn’t appear to have moved, and her smile remained as constant and mad as the Cheshire Cat’s.
When John returned to the bedroom his hands were trembling.
“Is that better, officer?”
“It’s fine.”
The cop sounded as if he had already moved on mentally to the next call. John needed to reach him, and he had to do it now.
“Officer, please. I can’t have her here overnight. My son is coming over to open presents tomorrow.”
John lowered his voice.
“What if she’s dangerous?”
He could hear papers shuffling on the other end of the line.
“What exactly do you want me to do here, sir?”
“Can you send a car to pick her up and let her stay at the station or something? Don’t you have a drunk tank?”
“Does she appear to be intoxicated?”
John hesitated.
“Yes,” he lied unconvincingly.
“What’s your name, sir?”
“John. John Patrick Moss, officer.”
“Mr. Moss, I’m going to level with you. We have no room to house anyone at the station and regardless, we could only do that if this woman had committed a crime. You could call an ambulance, but they won’t come because she’s not experiencing a health emergency. If she was outside and in distress maybe they would get her but she’s not. You could call a taxi to take her to a shelter but all the beds in the shelters are occupied. They always are in weather like this. As far as the law is concerned, this woman is your guest. If you want her to leave and she refuses to, I can send an officer to make her go but I can’t honestly say where she’ll end up.”
Officer PP-6336’s tone had softened. For the first time he sounded to John like a person and not a brusquely hostile android.
“I wish I could help you, John. Her too. But I can’t. Good luck.”
“I understand, officer.”
And he did. It was ruthless, inhumane logic that left him in impossible and absurd circumstances, but he did.
“Merry Christmas,” Officer PP-6336 said, and John’s phone went quiet.
When he slunk back into the living room, John found the woman’s fixed grin and glazed eyes still aimed at the silenced choir on the television. Were they going to be performing all night?
He forced himself to sit down on a chair and look directly at her. Clots of her thawing hair hung down the sides of her face like wilting vines.
“Ma’am, we need to talk. I just spoke to the poli—to someone and it looks like no one can help you tonight. Now, you can stay on that couch, but I have to go before noon tomorrow and you need to leave when I do. The weather will be better by then.”
Would it be? John had no idea but there was no way in hell he was going to leave her here on her own.
“Okay?”
The woman stared straight ahead.
John imagined grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking the frozen smile off her flushed, immobile face. He leaned forward instead and pressed his palms against his forehead.
“I know you can talk. You said something to me on the subway.”
Silence.
“Can you please show that you hear me? How about you nod? Just nod your head if you understand what I’m saying to you.”
The woman remained as still and mute as an exceptionally disciplined artist’s model. Whatever had animated her before seemed to have gone completely. Looking at her was like gazing through a broken window into an abandoned, derelict house. Or, perhaps more accurately, a haunted one.
Outside the apartment, the wind screeched.
John almost tripped hurrying off the chair and onto his feet.
“That’s the bathroom.”
He waved his arms vaguely, a gesture that felt as futile as it did ridiculous.
“Well, goodnight.”
On his way through the kitchen, John took the big carving knife from the drawer, paused, and then gathered all the other sharp knives, a pair of scissors, and some disposable razors from the bathroom. He felt ridiculous hiding this pile of potential weaponry under his bed, but it was better than imagining the woman getting at it. He kept remembering more household items that could be used for violent ends—the baseball bat in the closet, the hammer in the toolbox, the bleach under the bathroom sink—but to reach them he would have to cross in front of her again and he did not want to do that. The truth was, as Jake would say, she creeped him out bigtime.
As he lay in bed his thoughts tore at him like a hungry dog worrying a bone. Why hadn’t he installed a lock on the bedroom door? Why had he put himself in this position? What was wrong with him? Somehow things had acquired a momentum of their own and here he was, about to have a sleepover with a seemingly catatonic indigent. Seemingly is the key word there, a primitive part of his brain yammered. She moved pretty damned quickly when she was stalking you outside. What if she’s pretending? Waiting for you to let your guard down and then—
John jolted at the sound of voices in the other room. Had the woman let someone into the apartment? His body stiffened and his heart hammered until he realized what he was hearing was that infernal choir singing “Silent Night”. So she had merely turned the volume on the television up yet again. His relief was tempered by the thought of the remote control that he had left on top of the television. There was no way she could have reached it without leaving the couch. She must be moving around out there.
He considered going to the living room to check on her but decided to barricade the door from the inside instead. John angled a chair so its back rested under the doorknob and spread out some of Jake’s Hot Wheels and a toy xylophone on the floor around it. Even if the woman somehow managed to open the door, he would hear her entering the bedroom.
A reasonable sounding voice spoke up from somewhere inside him.
Get it together, man, Look at yourself. I mean really, look at yourself. You’re making traps and hiding under the covers from a harmless old woman.
But was she really harmless? Why did the hairs on his neck bristle when he imagined her in the other room grinning away, doing God knew what?
John tossed and turned in his bed, but the day had been punishingly long, and he was so very tired. He finally lay on his side and fell asleep to the muffled sound of the choir singing “Ave Maria”.
In his dream, John was back in the Sacred Heart church rectory where he had grudgingly taken his confirmation classes. The priest, Father Billy Norton—fifteen years dead—was acting out the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac with the same ghoulish, drunken enthusiasm he had when John had been in the eighth grade. The only differences were that Father Billy’s bloodshot blue eyes were now bright silver and that John was the lone student in the class. He was seated right at the front, directly below the ranting priest in the same unfortunate spot where Lex Legare had once absorbed a sickening amount of Norton’s whiskey-inflected saliva.
“Where’s the lamb, Daddy!? Where’s the lamb?” Norton as Isaac entreated.
John suddenly felt a blazing hot sun beating down on the back of his neck. He looked around and saw that he was dangerously close to the precipice of what must have been a mountain. Jake, dressed in a robe and bound to a black rock with rope, looked up at him with awful, complete trust. John noticed that he was holding a curved dagger high above his head. He tried to lower the blade but couldn’t move.
“Where is the lamb?” Jake asked him.
“God will provide,” John answered in a voice that was not his own and as the knife plunged at Jake’s throat, he woke up screaming.
He lay panting in darkness, his face wet with tears. For a moment he was grateful to feel the familiar terra of his bed but somehow it seemed smaller and more cramped than it should have. He started to stretch out but what he felt then froze him in place. Someone was in there with him.
He didn’t need light to know what had happened. It had been a while, but he still remembered how it felt to have a naked woman spoon against his back. How had she gotten in there without waking him? Her leg was draped over the side of his hip, pinning him down. Her soft bare breasts pressed into his spine. To his horror, he felt himself getting hard.
John tried to free himself, but her arm shot out snake-like and wrapped around his waist. He struggled but her grip was shockingly strong. He opened his mouth to scream and she shoved her fingers into it, gagging him. She forced him onto his back and straddled him as he thrashed as fruitlessly as a midge in a spiderweb.
He bit at her fingers, but it was like trying to contain a wave of rapidly rising dough. Her hand was expanding, filling his mouth and invading his throat. He was choking on her.
As she leaned down, John felt the rest of her body spreading out amorphously over him, covering him like a suffocating, gelatinous wave. She was merging with him, assimilating him into her.
Fireworks went off in his oxygen-starved brain as she whispered wetly into his ear with the passion of a devotee, “You are wonderful.”
He lay helplessly still as her tongue probed his eardrum like an insistent worm and her guttural voice transformed into a piercing, insectile buzz.
The droning went on for almost a full minute before John realized that it was the alarm on his phone. He shivered as the sweat that soaked his sheets began to evaporate and took a few seconds to orient himself, touching first the rest of the bed to make sure he was alone in it and then his body to reassure him that he was still whole.
It had been by far the worst and most vivid dream he had ever had. He momentarily allowed himself to hope that his entire encounter with the woman had been a part of the same dark dream. After all, it had been charged with a similar, surreal intensity.
But when he turned the phone’s alarm off and heard the choir from the other room singing “Angels We Have Heard on High”—surely these couldn’t still be the same singers—he knew that the waking part of this nightmare was far from over.
The first thing he noticed when he walked into the living room was that the remote control was on top of the television, exactly where he had left it. This filled him with an irrational but undeniably strong sense that somehow the volume of the choir had risen without the woman handling the remote or stirring from the couch at all. The second thing he noticed was the smell.
The stench emanating from her was vile. She smelled like his mother’s excretions had when she was dying in hospice with a belly full of cancer. His stomach dropped when he saw dark liquid soaking through his coat and pooling at the woman’s feet.
She didn’t look good either. Not good at all.
Open, running sores dotted her cheeks and her skin hung loosely from her face in folds. Blue-black craters had spread under her sunken eyes. When he looked more closely at her vacuous smile, he saw that some of her teeth had fallen out. If he had only sensed it before, it was obvious now that something was terribly wrong with her.
She’s dying.
No. She wasn’t. She couldn’t be. He was due to pick up Jake any minute and she simply could not be here when he brought him back. Not a chance. So she was unwell mentally. So she was sick. So she was in a bit of a bad way. It probably looked a lot worse than it was. He had let her come in out of the storm. He had let her stay at his place. What else could he be expected to do? How much was enough? It was time for her to go.
John didn’t bother speaking to her this time. There was no time and no reason for social graces. He knew she either wouldn’t or couldn’t respond. He pushed through a visceral sense of disgust and tried to move her from the couch but was stunned by how heavy and solid she was. When he squatted down for leverage and attempted to lift her, she toppled forward bonelessly, sending him sprawling onto his back. She made no effort to break her fall and her face smashed into the coffee table with a sickening thud.
Unleashing a continuous, almost perfectly balanced wave of prayer and profanity, John struggled to his feet and managed to restore the woman to something approximating her previous position on the couch. When he saw the state of her face, his stomach lurched. Her dented nose gushed blood. Pus from the yawning lesions smeared her cheeks. Horribly, she was still smiling.
John reached for his cell phone to dial 911 and discovered a text from Petra, his ex-wife.
Are you almost here? Jake is waiting.
As he was reading the message another one appeared.
Earth to John!!! Hello!???!??!
He raised the phone to call her then hesitated. What was he going to tell her? The truth? He couldn’t, at least not if he had any hope of bringing Jake over to open the presents sitting under the tiny, artificial tree. However compassionate Petra—who had grown up in Malibu and attended boarding school in Switzerland—might imagine herself to be, he couldn’t see her handing over Jake to spend Christmas Day with any homeless person, let alone one who was dripping blood onto the carpet and grinning like Nosferatu.
No, he would call to apologize for being late and say nothing about the woman, only that he was on his way. He would pick Jake up and prepare him for seeing her—as much as he could anyway—on the way home, and then call an ambulance for her. He had settled on the apartment specifically because it was so close to the house that he and Petra had once shared and if he hustled there, he should be able to make it back in fifteen minutes. But first he needed to do something about the woman’s face, to mitigate how traumatic her visage would be for Jake as much as to assuage his guilt for leaving her in this condition.
Before he did that though, he would get her some water. He could at least do that for her. He filled a glass at the kitchen sink and willed himself to get close enough to her to reach her mouth.
“Here’s a drink for you, okay?”
His voice sounded strange and tinny to him, a lost recording from an extinct civilization.
As fast as he poured the water it drooled out of her red, broken mouth and onto her lap.
He went back to the sink, dampened a clean sponge and wetted her chapped, cracked lips then retrieved a fresh roll of toilet paper from the bathroom to stanch her bleeding nose. When he wound it around her head, carefully breathing through his mouth, the toilet paper clung to her ruined face like sticky gauze. She looked like a demented grandmother ready to hand out Halloween candy in a low-budget but effectively gruesome mummy costume. At the thought of this, John restrained an unhinged laugh.
He put on his boots then took a couple of sweaters from the dryer to wear. They wouldn’t make up for the loss of his jacket but hopefully they would help him tolerate the cold for the short time he would have to be out in it.
When he dialed her number, Petra answered her phone on the first ring. Before she spoke, she uttered a sigh of such withering contempt that he immediately cursed himself for calling in the first place.
“What?”
His intention to apologize shrank in the biting cold of her hostility.
“I’m running behind. Leaving now.”
“You haven’t even left yet?”
“What did I just—”
“Don’t start with me, John,” she said.
He bit his lip hard, took a deep breath and then another one. He had to keep it together. A shouting match on the phone was not going to facilitate his Christmas with Jake.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Petra. Really. I mean it,” he said.
The silence that followed gave him a moment of hope until it was punctured by a raw, ragged bellow that could only have had one source.
“You are terrific!”
When John tried to speak, his mouth opened and closed as silently and mindlessly as a fish’s. Was it possible that Petra hadn’t heard it? Maybe it had sounded exaggeratedly loud to him.
“Was that a woman, John? Do you have someone over there?”
“I can explain…”
“Go to hell.”
He heard himself asking her to wait but he was talking into a void. She had hung up on him.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” John said.
He looked at the woman’s toilet paper covered face—still and vacant as a waxwork now, of course—and once more fought the impulse to laugh. He was starting to feel like the victim of some kind of absurd, cosmic prank show.
But who was the host? Who or what might be crouching behind the curtain or watching through the hidden camera, preparing to reveal itself.
It’s time to go.
Yes, it was. Jake was waiting for him.
John’s father had been a ghost in his own home, absent even during the rare times he was around, translucent long before he disappeared completely.
When Jake was born, John had vowed that he would not repeat this pattern, that he would always be there for his son. Yes, he had let him down by torching his already failing marriage in a weeklong bender that culminated in sex with three different women on three consecutive nights. But he was trying. He hadn’t had a drink or seen a woman since the breakup. He had given up his financial interest in the house in exchange for shared custody. Whatever happened, he needed Jake to know that his father had shown up for him.
He took out a garbage bag from under the sink and piled the presents into it. Petra might not let him bring Jake home after what she had heard on the phone and as the seemingly indefatigable TV choir sang “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and he saw the blood soaking through the toilet paper on the woman’s face, it was impossible not to think that might be for the best. But if he couldn’t take Jake home for Christmas then he would bring Christmas to Jake.
On his way to the door, he hesitated. Had something shifted in the woman’s face?
He bent down as close to her as he could stand to.
“I don’t know if you’re in there or not but in case you can hear me, I need to go see my son. It’s Christmas Day and I made him a promise.”
She stared through him blankly and he felt as foolish as a man caught tossing coins into a wishing well and waiting for a receipt.
“I’ll come back soon and when I do, I will get you help. That’s a promise too.”
Her gaze was an abyss. His words disappeared into it like a thimble full of luminescent water in a sea of darkness.
Before he left the apartment, he cupped the Kinder Surprise Egg—Jake’s special treat—in his palm as gently as if it were a small animal.
John knew something was wrong as soon as he stepped outside. The snow had finally stopped but if anything, it was colder. Everything was covered in a layer of ice. The sharp, chlorine smell of ozone permeated the air, as if an electrical storm was impending, but the air itself was abnormally still. A siren blared in the distance. Worst of all, a third of the sky was an unnatural looking purplish black.
The streets were empty, which he supposed was typical for Christmas morning, but as he made his way to Petra’s—stepping gingerly over the icy sidewalk in spite of the thick treads on his winter boots—he saw that all the decorative seasonal lights on the houses he was passing had gone dark. The bleakness of the overall effect was only enhanced by the rising sound of the siren as he neared Petra’s house. As determined as he was to see Jake, it was difficult for him not to flee back to his apartment.
She’s waiting for you.
He found the siren’s source just fifty feet from Petra’s front door. An ambulance was parked at a jagged angle in the middle of the street, its emergency lights reflecting off the surrounding ice. There was no sign of a driver. Its rear doors were open and an empty stretcher lay on the street in front of them. A pair of black boots rested in the snow near the stretcher. They were still laced up. For some reason, John thought of fossilized dinosaur remains preserved in a tar pit.
What is happening here?
He didn’t have time to think about it. He was beginning to get the sense that he might not have much time at all.
When he rang her doorbell, after a delay long enough to seem intentional, Petra opened the door just far enough that he could see a fraction of her face. She didn’t unlatch the door chain. Her gaze moved down to the garbage bag he was carrying.
“I don’t want your trash, John. Bring it back to your new friend.”
“Petra—”
“Why are you here? You’re not bringing Jake home to some stranger. Or have you introduced him to her already? We agreed to talk about that first.”
He tried to keep his voice calm and measured but the fact that he had to raise it to be heard over the abandoned ambulance’s siren worked against him.
“I don’t even know who she is. She followed me home from the subway. She’s old and sick and probably homeless. I was trying to help her.”
“Did you fuck her?”
“No! Did you hear what I just said?”
“So why didn’t you tell me all that when you called?”
He hesitated.
“I thought you wouldn’t believe me,” he said.
“I don’t believe you.”
After all the lies he had told her, why would she?
“Can I come in? We can watch Jake open the presents together and then I’ll leave. Just give me half an hour.”
“No.”
“Petra, please.”
“No!”
For a moment his desperation tipped into black rage and he imagined slamming his shoulder into the door and breaking the chain. It wasn’t strong enough to keep him out if he decided to come in and the stark truth was neither was she.
He took a step back for leverage but then his vision was drawn upwards and he saw Jake in his Tyrannosaurus rex pajamas, tapping at the glass of his second-floor bedroom window. It didn’t seem possible that John could have heard him but somehow he had sensed him there. When they made eye contact, Jake smiled and waved. John waved back at him and his brittle fury broke like a thin, dry twig damming over a boundless wave of grief.
Now, when he thought of kicking the door until the chain broke, forcing his way into the house, he could only envision the resultant fear and confusion on Jake’s face. He took a deep breath and looked back at Petra. Her one eye that was visible to him through the crack in the door was bulging and there was too much white in it. She was angry, yes, but underneath that she was terrified. Was she really so frightened of him, or could she feel on some level that something was cataclysmically wrong out here?
In the end, did it matter?
He laid down the garbage bag full of presents on the welcome mat they had chosen together—“It’s Good to be Home” was written on it in folksy cursive—and held out the Kinder Surprise Egg to her.
He nodded slowly.
“Please tell Jake that I love him.” He needed a few seconds before he could continue. “So much. And that I’m sorry.”
His capitulation disarmed her. She made no move to open the chain, but her lip trembled and she took the egg from him.
He looked back up at Jake and blew him a kiss. Jake returned it and waved again, his smile turning pensive.
John wheeled around and walked away as quickly as he could on the slippery sidewalk. He needed to go right now or he thought he might lie down on the ground outside the house and not get back up.
He felt tears freezing in his eyelashes as he headed back in the direction of the apartment. He had left him there. His boy. Jake wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on, just that Daddy had come like he said he would but had left without explanation, without even giving him a hug.
Even if that was true, it was better than him seeing his parents tear each other apart, the way they had done for most of his short life.
The streets were desolate. Snow had begun to fall again. It pricked his skin like tiny shards of frozen glass. He looked up and saw that the discoloured part of the sky had turned even darker shades of black and purple, like a rapidly worsening bruise. The sound of several other sirens had joined the original one, forming a blaring chorus. John shivered as he felt the temperature drop lower still and was struck by the thought that this cold was originating from inside him. He imagined a snow globe that contained everything he was seeing and spotted himself, a lone, tiny speck moving around inside it. When a proportionately enormous hand dropped the globe and it smashed, he felt nothing but relief.
Through the gloom he saw the liquor store’s sign emerge like a beacon and swerved towards it swiftly and instinctively. The store’s windows had been smashed and it had already been ransacked, but there was still plenty left to go around. He picked up the bottle of whiskey and it felt like home.
He aimed himself at the apartment because he had nowhere else to go. As he walked, a feeling rose in him of being pursued, similar to what he had felt when the woman had followed him home but much stronger and more concentrated, like the difference between the silhouette of a thing and the thing itself. He turned around quickly but the street behind him was empty. When he faced forward again, however, a large shape was advancing towards him with chilling speed. He cringed away, almost slipping on the ice, but managed to steady himself. The thing stopped moving and his eyes were able to translate its shape into something concrete if contextually bizarre. It was a huge, riderless pale horse, staring wild-eyed in his direction. Its nostrils flared and it reared back and whinnied. It had no saddle, but for a moment he thought he saw something made of shadow capering on its back. Then, as suddenly as the beast had appeared, it galloped away into the falling snow and was gone.
Something behind John’s eyes throbbed. Had the creature escaped from a Mountie? He imagined a pair of distinctively high boots sitting in the snow, like the pair he had seen near the ambulance. But where was the saddle? And what was that thing he had seen on its back, flickering like an old projection of a black and white movie?
These questions just made his head hurt worse. There were no satisfactory answers to them. He was holding the only satisfactory answer to anything ever in a bottle in his hand. He would have opened it now and drowned himself in it, but he found that his fingers were too cold to move.
He needed to get inside and get this whiskey inside him, but he couldn’t feel his extremities. With great effort, he started moving again. That uncanny and pervasive sense of being followed hadn’t left with the horse, though. He kept looking behind him but whoever or whatever was coming after him—if anything was—remained elusive.
The only time he slowed his pace was when he saw something that he thought at first was a remarkably lifelike ice sculpture of a human body. It was on its hands and knees on someone’s lawn, in front of a Christmas display of Santa’s sleigh being pulled by his reindeer. On closer examination, the figure revealed itself to be an actual old man frozen under a thin layer of ice. The man’s coat was threadbare—it barely looked warm enough for fall—and he had tied plastic bags over his feet, to try to keep the snow out. His eyes were open, milky white and utterly empty. John turned away and moved faster, the sound of his own panting breaths rattling in his ears. When he saw the apartment, he somehow found the strength to run. The last thing he heard before his stiff, freezing fingers managed to unlock the door was the growl of an animal far too large and wild to be found in a city.
Any relief he might have felt at escaping whatever was going on outside was snuffed out instantly by the wave of scent that crashed over him in the apartment. The stench of rot and disease that had been radiating off the woman earlier was still there, but it was only a minor accent to what was now an overwhelming, coppery reek. It smelled like an animal’s cave at the end of winter.
Though the power was out everywhere, somehow the TV choir was still going strong, saving his least favourite hymn of all—“The Little Drummer Boy”—for the worst possible moment. The flickering lights from the TV provided scant illumination, but he didn’t need to see well to know what the flood of liquid covering the floor and coating the walls was. Something inside the woman must have hemorrhaged.
He knew she was dead without looking at her. No one could bleed that much and live. Besides, he could feel her absence in his viscera. It dominated the atmospheric landscape of the apartment like a painting composed almost entirely of negative space.
Look at her.
Hell no. He wasn’t going to look at her. She was dead and gone. The only thing he was going to look at was the bottle in his hand. His eyes focused on its red label. He would drink it down until he couldn’t see anything at all. He wondered distantly if he would be able to get it all in without throwing up.
You made a promise.
But what was one more broken promise, really? What was one more piece of trash added to the landfill? No one was watching. No one cared. What did it fucking matter?
But it does.
When he had gone to the court-mandated AA meetings, the former army sergeant running them had talked about the difference between pain and suffering, how pain was merely sensation and suffering was the story you told yourself about the pain. How pain was finite but suffering could go on forever in the psyche and was thus unendurable. So what was the answer to suffering? The same as the answer to everything in those meetings: follow the steps.
Listening to other people’s stories of degradation and loss at those meetings had helped him, but the steps had left him cold. Step three was the real asskicker. How could he make a decision to turn his will and life over to the care of God as he understood Him when he deeply, profoundly didn’t understand Him? When he vacillated between not believing in Him at all and being enraged at Him for the state of the world. How could he take a leap of faith when what he saw all around him and especially in the mirror gave him no reason to hold that faith?
But as that insistent voice had reminded him (whose voice?), he had made a promise. No more numbing. No more hiding. No more self-annihilation. As painful as life might be, as painful as he might make it for himself, he would stay conscious for it. But how naive he had been. How could he have known what he was promising?
Just half the bottle, just a swallow, one little sip, what could it hurt, what difference would it make, who would even know, oh God it hurts, I can’t do it on my own, oh dear God help me—
Howling, he heaved the bottle against the wall with the last ounce of his strength and it shattered. The grainy, yeasty smell of whiskey covered the scent of blood and the dead woman’s stink. Saliva squirted in his mouth. When he looked at the wet, glinting splinters of glass on the carpet he wanted so badly to crawl over to them on the floor and lick at them that he could taste the intermingled alcohol and blood from his lacerated tongue. Instead, he made himself look directly at the woman.
She was a shell now, a ravaged simulacrum of a human body. Mercifully, her head had slumped forward onto her chest, hiding her eyes and making her resemble a sleeping child. In death, her smile looked more peaceful and less hungry. He stunned himself by going to her, reaching out and embracing her gently. She was cool to the touch. He heard something over the TV choir’s pa rum pum pum pum’s and realized it was the sound of his own wretched tears. His body was wracked with sobs. The world had reduced this woman to zero. No one had loved her or cared about her. She mattered so little that she had become invisible. Then she had come to him for help and he had left her to die alone. His grief was oceanic. It washed away his disgust, judgment and fear all at once. It felt like it would rend him into minute fragments but somehow his form held together.
He tenderly brushed at hair that was glued to her face with blood then hugged her harder—and felt something inside her move. He lurched away from her. She had felt so cold. Could her heart still be beating? He lifted her head to see if she was breathing and when his thumb pressed against the side of her cheek it met no resistance at all and slid right into it. Whatever was under her skin was hideously warm. John shrieked and withdrew his hand as if it had been scalded then watched as her face collapsed in on itself like a disintegrating souffle. He thought of Jake’s Kinder Surprise, the chocolate surrounding it crumbling away from the yellow plastic receptacle that held its true nature.
He staggered backwards as her body began to vibrate, and with a sound like fabric ripping, her skin split and started sloughing off. Glowing white, membranous wings emerged through the torn skin on her back and shoulders.
The choir started to sing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and he thought helplessly of the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, of George Bailey, his life redeemed, surrounded by the friends and family he hadn’t realized he had meant so much to, of Zuzu’s petals and her high, little girl’s voice saying, “Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”
The rest of the woman’s skin fell to the floor like discarded wrapping paper as the creature that had nested within it fully appeared. Its skin shone so brightly that John was forced to squint as its wings spread out to the width of the living room.
He looked into its terrible, beautiful face and his eyes melted into liquid that dripped down his cheeks like candle wax. Somehow, in the dark, he still sensed the light that the being was generating and felt the scorching heat, which increased tenfold as it reached out to him. His skin crackled as it touched him.
The chorus of sirens was louder now, drowning out the choir, joined by what sounded like a thousand trumpets blasting through a megaphone. In the midst of the cacophony, he heard something roaring and the distant sound of people screaming.
His sightless eyes saw Jake waving from Petra’s upstairs window, and he wished he had been able to touch him once more, to ruffle his hair, to lift him in his arms and kiss him; to say goodbye.
The creature put its blazing arms around him in an encompassing embrace. He didn’t know what would happen next, whether a beam of light would carry him off somewhere beyond pain, or this emissary would spirit him away and drop him into a lake of fire, or if he would just end, like a star in the night sky winking out forever. He supposed it didn’t matter. He was in the hands of a higher power.
John surrendered.
As a playwright, Wes Berger has had his plays You Are Here, Desert Places, Fool and First Dates produced at various festivals in his home city of Toronto. He has directed these and several other works for the theatre, including five first productions of plays by award-winning Canadian playwright George F. Walker, and The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh. As an actor on film and television for over twenty years, he has appeared in everything from a Marvel movie (The Incredible Hulk) to The Handmaid’s Tale. He co-wrote and acted in Happy Families, an independent feature film currently in post-production. The COVID pandemic inspired Wes to follow his lifelong dream of writing horror fiction, of which he has been a devoted fan since, as a child, he sneaked his mother’s forbidden copy of Stephen King’s It out of a closet in 1986. “Stray” is his first published short story. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and is the father of three wonderful children.
“Stray” by Wes Berger. Copyright © 2025 by Wes Berger.
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