2010

The Carriage House Home for Aged Women

Spectacle Cove, Rhode Island

Memory is a bloody thing when you’ve lived snarled with secrets too long. As you watch the light change before sunset from your bed, everything you willed to forget gathers to dissect you to the bone.

A dull headache looms, your mouth cottons, and the stool softeners worm their way around your guts. Still, before it grows dark, you think fondly of a son who doesn’t visit much but pays for a bed beside the window, where the bay shines gold. It gives you something to look at besides yourself and you watch the shifting sea as if through a telescope from the moon.

With hearing aids out of reach on the bedside table, the low pulse of what’s left of your hearing is punctuated by distant screams and your heart responds with an arrhythmic shudder. Your fellow residents are howling. Sundowners. Their psychotic episodes plume as the sunlight fades.

Like them, you’re receding from this life piece by piece, but one thing tethers you to this bed. One thing anchors you here—more than the husband you didn’t know how to live with, then learned to live without more than sixty years ago; more than the guilt of being a less than willing mother and a disinterested son to prove it; more than spending a lifetime on factory floors envious of anyone with a high school diploma; and more than all the family you buried, whether you were speaking to them or not—none of whom, by the way, have stepped through the ether to show you the way home, if the stories from hospice nurse are even true.

It’s just you.

And every day is the same; waiting for the pain medication to send you to sleep and hope, this time, it’s for good.

You startle. A swift, dark shape shoots past your window. The painful jolt jostles your spine.

Even with dimming eyes, you know it was a barn swallow barreling into the eaves, and you swear you can hear the rattle of it roosting for the night. The tap, tap, tap of a beak and tiny, scratching feet.

Like the shadows now spreading on a dark purple bay, something calls to you—a thick, viscous groan, forcing you to remember the sacrifices you made, one by one, to the endless dark.

* * *

In 1915, you were five. You spent the summer sitting at your mother’s side within the great thrumming aisles of the Kimball Silk Mill of South Kingston, coaxing pale filaments from wet cocoons after the caterpillars were boiled alive.

Nearly bumped off yourself by polio, you spent the summer at the mill as you recovered from surgery—the doctors had snipped portions of your Achilles’ tendons in an attempt to flatten your feet. They were warped by the neurological damage of the virus, but the procedure didn’t work. You still toe-walked alongside your mother—in your big sister’s castoff boots with newspaper stuffed into the gaps under your heels—and you defied the doctor’s prognosis that you’d never walk again.

“You did all those yourself?” Mr. Ross patted your head and puffed on a cigarette. “Kid, you’re fast! You can stay on the job as long as you like!”

“She’s going to school in September,” your mother said, her voice lilting with the Italian accent she always tried to dispel, “with her brothers and sister.”

“Pity.” He continued toward his office above the factory floor. “We’ll miss ya, kid.”

He disappeared up the steps to his office as you determined to work even faster. The more cocoons you unfurled without breaking the thread, the more money your mother took home.

You were the smallest of four and your father said that of all of his children, you were the fiercest. You attended school and learned to read, but after a few fistfights in the schoolyard with kids who made fun of your limp, you were back in the mill by ten, standing in Mr. Ross’s office with the weight of your mother’s gaze upon you.

The noise from the factory floor swelled around the room until he rushed in and closed the door. The thin plywood provided some relief from the racket below and you exhaled, until the phone on his desk rattled and startled you.

“One second.” He lifted the mouthpiece and placed the receiver to his ear. “Uh-huh. Yep, get the ladder, Billy. Yep.”

The family needed the money and you weren’t cut out for the books like your sister. Your parents’ jobs and the tailoring your mother took in wasn’t enough. Your two oldest brothers had joined the Navy and hadn’t sent home any pay yet. Your sister needed tuition for secretarial school. She gave you the hand-me-down dress, handstitched by your mother, and it hung from you, boxy and itchy.

“They grow up fast, don’t they?” He replaced the receiver, straightened his navy-blue silk tie with a gold paisley print into his vest and sat behind his desk. He motioned for your mother to take the other chair.

When he asked your age, you looked him right in the eye and lied easily. “I’m twelve and I’m fast. You know I’m fast.” You stood as tall as you could and frowned like the faces you’d seen on your way in.

His smiled, softening the sharp angles of his face. “Good. That’s just what we need. What about the polio?” He pointed to your oversized boots. “You get around OK?”

“What polio?” You shot a look at your mother. She winced but you continued. “I ran up those stairs so quick you didn’t even see me do it, did you?”

He laughed as he handed your mother a paper and she folded it away into her purse, for you to read to her later.

You stole a glance from his wide office window that looked out upon the workers buzzing away on the expansive floor, the machinery spinning. You saw Billy, his floorman, expertly weaving through the aisles, a wooden ladder under one arm.

Fast. Like everyone down there.

Like you.

* * *

You joined the night shift with your mother, ensuring silk threads never broke, feeding rows upon rows of spools that never stopped twirling in their hunger for more. Your mother ran a line of looms through the night while you clopped along the wooden floor in your boots.

A few months into your job, when the moon shined dusty and fat through the long factory windows, you were replacing full spools of silk with empty ones when a peculiar movement in the rafters caught your eye. You paused at your cart. A little bird twitched in the beams above the clattering machinery. It was panting, revealing a mouth the color of marigold.

You realized that if that bird pooped into the silk, you didn’t know how much would be docked from your pay. It fidgeted on the beam, and you saw from its dark points and tawny breast that it was a swallow.

You pushed your cart against a brick pillar and opened windows against the moon-soaked night. When the sweeper kid circled a row of machines, trying to look busy with his broom, you signaled him.

“Hey, Nicky,” you shouted over the din, “get a ladder.”

You held the ladder steady against a pillar while Nick climbed, fluff and lint stuck all over his woolen short pants, his rump in your face. You passed his broom up to his waiting hand.

Nick swung at the bird, hitting it harder than you’d hoped.

It fell, stiff with terror—black, shiny button eyes flashing as it tumbled into the web of wriggling threads, tangled into taut wires of silk, little wings twisting asunder. The spools spun, twirling and whirling and the bird rolled, ugly in its writhing and threatening to pop several threads of silk all at once.

Swiftly, you left the ladder and reached into the shivering threads for the bird. You turned just in time to see Nick fall hard against the wooden slats of the mill floor, the ladder crashing on top of him. You withdrew your hand.

Cradling his head, Nick revealed bright red fingertips as blood oozed and dripped on the floorboards. When he stumbled to his feet, he left a crimson smear where he’d fallen.

Billy, the floorman appeared out of nowhere, and caught Nick as he staggered.

“You two palookas.” Billy shook Nick by a shoulder. “What’s this?”

“A bird.” You reached into the threads again, your heart pounding.

Nick looked like he was fighting off tears. Billy touched his head and sent him home.

The row of machinery paused for a whole sixty seconds. The stillness around you was like a church, even though the other rows still hummed. You parted the threads to tease the broken bird free so it could die in your hands.

When the machinery heaved into action again, a hiss filled the air and you were terrified the floorman would blame you, but he didn’t. He just pointed to the mess in your hands and said, “Don’t take it home an’ eat it. I know what you guineas are like. Clean up the floor.”

Billy walked away from you, taking the ladder with him until he paused to talk to pretty Edie in the next aisle.

The bird in your hand was soft and warm and Nick’s blood on the floor shone bright red. You bent to look closer. It was swirling, like it was cascading down a drain. The wooden floor hadn’t seen a lick of oil in ages and it was pulling the blood right down into its pith. Peering closer, you felt something heave, like a ripple in the air or the across walls, you weren’t sure, but when you looked up, the machines whirred faster and spun cleanly, without any evidence of the disaster.

You pocketed the bird and wheeled your cart along the row and the spools spun so fast, you had to replace them all before you could clean the floor.

By the time you returned with a bucket and brush, the bloodstains were gone. You stood there in disbelief, wondering if you had the right aisle, but you did; and the end of your shift, you counted sixty spools over the usual output, all feeding into the looms in your mother’s section.

When you punched the time clock, you didn’t tell your mother about Nick—who you never saw again—or the bird.

The bird. You pushed your hand in your pocket and found that it had bled through the fabric of your dress. You threw it into the shrubs by the factory doors and it didn’t make a sound as it slipped through the branches into the darkness.

* * *

A few months later, when the moon hung orange and low, things went tail up for pretty Edie too.

Since your first shift, you stole looks at Edie through the machinery and shuddering lengths of silk threads and you saw how she flirted with Billy. She had moxie. And now she had a little, gold bracelet that flashed from the crimp of her shirt sleeve. Your mother told you that girls did bad things to get gold bracelets, so you never wanted one, but still, you felt your cheeks burn every time she caught you staring.

Edie said she was sixteen but maybe she was a tall fourteen. She had long, chestnut hair and she wore it all pinned up in a big floppy bow she made herself from fabric offcuts. You asked her to make you one and even stole some offcuts from your mother’s sewing basket, but she never did. She kept your offcuts though.

Unlike everyone else, she also left her station to drift past Billy and saunter into the washroom. Billy let her go when he never let anyone else go during their shifts, not even your mother.

But that night, with the moon fleshy and full in the window, Edie came back from the washroom with her hair askew and her nose red.

When you asked what happened, she pushed you away.

“Get lost, gimpy,” she sneered from behind the hair which had fallen from her bow.

As she retreated back to her section, you saw the tear in her skirt, right at the side-seam, and she wasn’t walking right. The grace in her gait that you envied was gone. But she was still pretty.

You were never pretty—your whole family told you that. Your older sister got the looks and the brains; your brothers were tall and handsome and charming.

What did you have? A broken nose from your father for lying about stealing your mother’s offcuts and a job at the mill.

The moon was gone and the light was lifting outside, and when you were counting your spools, Edie came up real close and said, “Can you help me?”

“Get lost, chippy.” You spat a word your mother used for girls of ill repute, and suddenly wished she would die. “Enjoy your breaks while the rest of us are cramping up.”

Even from the corner of your eye, you saw her slump, but you ignored it and your heart skipped at your courage to reject her.

You emptied your cart and looked up just in time to see Edie climb a ladder and step onto the ledge of the pale, third-story window. She hugged her body close to the pane in the early morning light, then dove head-first with terrible force.

You held your breath as you ran to the glass and saw her crumpled and twitching on the gravel road below. Face down, her head was crammed between her shoulders, and her body was all twisted up like that bird. The gravel bloomed in the shadows beneath the folds of her skirt and began to swirl, black and shiny like oil.

You swooned and clung to the sill, and the bricks that framed your view inhaled. The road rippled like a skirt around the mill and the whole building quaked. You felt it. You know you did. And when you looked down at your hands clutching the windowsill, Edie’s gold bracelet sat coiled between them. You pocketed it.

Beside you, Billy gripped your shoulder and you gasped. You thought he saw you take the bracelet, but he just stared out the window, down at the ground. He coughed raggedly and clutched at his chest and said, “Oh Christ! Oh Christ!”

When the machines groaned louder now, Billy looked at you searching; his mouth gaped as he swept his gaze across the rolling factory floor. The machines wailed hot like a mammoth pipe organ at church, and that’s when you knew what was happening. The lights surged overhead, the floor rocked, and a mist of silk dust rose from the speed of the spinning spools. Somehow, the mill drank Edie into it and churned her into silk.

You broke from Billy and stumbled as you rushed to thread and rethread like there were three of you on the job. Your feet tripped you up and you fell and split your chin, but you only redoubled your effort.

At the close of your shift, you counted and saw that production had doubled. There were more silk spools than the looms could manage and you boxed them. You volunteered for another shift to cover for Edie, you told your mother.

Mr. Ross came in with the police that morning. He looked at you grimly and thanked you for your dedication at this time of need. Your mother squeezed your arm hard and begged to take you home, but you refused.

“Let her work,” Mr. Ross said. “It’s better to stay busy.”

Your mother told you she was worried about you before she went home, but Mr. Ross doubled your pay.

* * *

You knew your mother wasn’t well as she leaned over her loom. You were seventeen and didn’t miss a thing. She was pregnant and throwing up again, and then she wasn’t.

Over the years, you watched her do things to her body with the same lye she used to make soap for the family. At home, you saw her stagger toward the outhouse and groan, sometimes dropping to her knees before she got there, and you always helped her. That night under a glittering moon as snow fell in dry, miserly flakes outside, you followed the urge to check on your mother, and it was clear, even in the jaundiced light, that the flesh around her mouth cast a green hue while the rest of her face was white as paste.

Your mother had bled through her clothes, oblivious to the red sheen that ran down the leg of her stool and seeped into the thirsty cracks of the floorboards. A white-hot rage boiled inside of you at the sight, at your father’s recklessness, at Billy’s stupidity, and even at Mr. Ross strolling past his office window—but you let nothing show.

You leaned in close and motioned for her to follow you.

She half stood, half crouched, pained in a way you’d never seen before.

“I got it, Ma.” You wrapped your cardigan around her waist and escorted her to the washroom. You glared at Billy and he averted his eyes, as he’d always done since Edie.

“Take your time,” you told her and left her there. You tucked her soiled underclothes under your arm and rode the automatic elevator until it released you to the basement.

Bare bulbs lit the unfinished portion of the cellar that housed an industrial incinerator, and in the lowest corner, past the ridges of the abandoned bricks, concrete rubble, and rotten footings that gave way to damp, bare soil, a gaping hole in the ground smelled like a brackish well.

By now, you’d fed it so many things: Edie’s gold bracelet, handfuls of live silkworms, mice. Even a few stray cats who’d been dazzled by the headlamps of Mr. Ross’s swerving automobile. You’d thrown in hessian sacks of unwanted puppies or a stolen piglet whenever machinery failures had you worried for your job. And it worked. Every time. The results were in the numbers, in the airy softness of the silk, and sometimes the way the colors “simply popped” as Mr. Ross put it.

Worst of all, you threw in every single one of the sad little birds your mother couldn’t bear to touch after her body had expelled them. Wrapped in offcut material, you cast them in, and they sailed into blackness, absorbed as the lights around you surged. The very foundation shook as the cardinal red or royal blue nearly levitated from gloved hands on the factory floor.

And Mr. Ross bought a new black Pierce-Arrow convertible and continued to expand his mill. He had so many different silk ties, he gave them away and never wore the same one twice.

* * *

The stock market crashed in October 1929—you were nineteen.

Only a few weeks before, Mr. Ross promoted you to floor-girl at Kimball Silk Mill, the first one ever, and you didn’t get a gold bracelet doing it.

You knew every inch of the mill and how Mr. Ross built it on swampland that no one wanted, which explained the big drainage ditch in the cellar. Mr. Ross also told you that there was a massacre, The Great Swamp Fight, between the colonials and the Narragansett people on this land and you wondered to yourself if all that bloodletting is what bewitched the place.

This was also the year your mother died. Cancer bloomed from all the lye she put in her body and your father grieved by working overtime and finding a girlfriend he thought was a secret. You practically lived at the mill and Billy did whatever you said.

Mr. Ross had called you to his office, a newspaper sprawled before him, pinned by a glass of whiskey. PANIC was the only newsprint word you read.

“You’re family,” he told the wall. “You’ve always been family.”

And you thought about your family. How your brothers never came back for more than an afternoon. How your sister got that secretarial job and left for Manhattan.

You wondered what your mother got.

Your father.

What you got.

You looked down at the smart top and skirt you earned, at the shoes on your feet. You could buy heels now that disguised your deformity: two-inch military heels with a patent-trimmed strap called the Savoy. You never wore hand-me-downs again.

“And this family’s in trouble.” His eyes were sunken, bloodshot, and you smelled the booze. “We’re in the red and we gotta get out of it.”

“People always want silk,” you said. “Even if they can afford nothing else, they’ll buy a little square of silk.”

“They need to buy more than that. We need something special to make sure of it. You’ve never been with a boy, have you?”

“What? No!”

“You should know, Billy didn’t hurt Edie. He knew what she was worth to me.”

“You know he hurt her. Why else did she—” You can’t say the rest.

“No, you’ve never been with a boy. There’s a dozen ways to enjoy a girl while keeping her intact. And Billy was a pervert.”

Mr. Ross said was. You looked out the big window, past the idle workers huddled in groups, past the silent machinery that had ground to a halt at the news of the market crash, past the brick pillars to the open grate of the automatic elevator. You realized then that you hadn’t seen Billy all night.

When you looked back at Mr. Ross, you understood. He knew all about his mill’s appetites. And you were pretty sure he knew you did too.

“I want to show you something.” He stood abruptly and tugged the handrail on the way down the steps from his office. The workers watched you, eyes black with fear.

Mr. Ross held the elevator open for you and took you down.

“You know what I told you about this place, how I could never fill this hole,” he motioned. “It ate everything we put in there. Backfill. Bricks. Concrete. It’s insatiable.”

His hands shook while he spoke. You hung back, lingering near the incinerator.

“You wouldn’t believe what I threw down there last night. Come. Have a look.”

You shook your head.

“Just c’mere.”

You inched closer.

In a sudden burst, he tackled you. You felt the sharpness of his bones and lean muscle. He clapped a hand over your mouth and dragged you forward as you flailed until, with a great heave, he threw you into the hole.

The world went light-dark, light-dark, and you tried to catch your hands on something and felt the skin of your fingers spilt.

You spun and when you bumped your head, you thought you heard a fragment of a song—your mother singing in Italian, like she did when you were sick with polio, before your father made her use only English because you were Americans now.

You slid and heard babies crying or were they puppies? And you thought you saw a spray of birds chirping in the black air around you as you reached through them to grab a hold of something and stop sliding into darkness.

The light of the cellar was still up there, and you stood on something that crunched like old bones. You rubbed your head but everything was numb. You smelled your fingers, but it wasn’t blood. It was the oily brine and sour decay of the hole itself. You wiped your hands on your skirt. Something glinted on a stone, and you grabbed it. Edie’s bracelet.

You climbed toward a ledge just as a thick hand grabbed your wrist and pulled you up. Your eyes adjusted. Billy.

He groaned as he leaned back, prone on a narrow ledge. “I can’t stop bleeding.”

A dark shape protruded from his chest. His fingers tap, tap, tapped on the stony ledge around him, his nails scratching.

“You gotta get out,” Billy whispered, lifting his chin toward another small ledge above him. “There.”

He reached for you, and you scrambled over his chest onto the ledge. He slid on his back and pushed you up with his feet with a grunt that turned phlegmy until he fell silent.

Quietly now, you climbed against stones and old root systems puffed up like varicose veins.

You smelled Mr. Ross’s cigarette, and crept closer to the mouth of the hole, toward the gauzy light of bare lightbulbs. You heard Mr. Ross weeping and cursing and lighting another cigarette, the matchhead smoked as it flicked past your face. His back was turned to you as you peered from the hole.

Surprising him was your gift—it had always been your gift—and you clawed your way up his trouser leg like a cat. He kicked at you but he slipped and hit the ground. You struck his nose with your elbow.

As you climbed over him, you hammered him with your two-inch spike heels, suddenly thrilled by the way they gave you purchase, his body a ladder until you pushed off from his shoulders and leapt from the hole. You heard a sharp crack of bone as he collided with Billy below.

* * *

And now, back in your bed, all you hear is that screaming again—the sundowners. It’s close and suffocating and you squeeze your eyelids tight and wish those bastards would shut the hell up for just one night.

You kick against the blankets and hit out with your bony fists, but you feel restraints on your wrists and when you open your eyes, you understand. As the light fades outside the window, reason dawns.

It’s you.

It’s always been you.

You and the mill.

And that hideous ground that marked you with its brine.

It’s searching for you always, you—the one that stole away.

The stench of sour decay winds through your nose and mouth and the bed itself writhes with roots that stretch over your legs and pull you in. The clatter and groan of the machines fill your ears, silk dust shimmers inside your eyelids, and worms twitch and drown again and again inside the eggshell of your skull and your congested lungs. When you open your mouth, reams of silk spill out across your bedclothes, all black now, just shining, oily black.

It’s always been you, thrashing as the last breath of sunset rolls across the bay and sinks, leaving you alone, dreadfully alone again in the dark with everything you thought you’d cast away.

“Silk” can be found in Hush, Don’t Wake the Monster Stories Inspired by Stephen King Women in Horror Anthology