Women In Horror Month - Alison Armstrong

 
 The Question
By Alison Armstrong

(Previously published in Book of Bones, 2020, edited by J. L . Lane   and Andrew Bell)
 
“When are you going to die?” I hear a child ask.
As waitresses carry trays of food and drinks through the crowded rock and blues dinner club, I look around the room for the child. I see couples of various ages gabbing, guzzling beer, or smooching. I see a few loners fidgeting with their phones or glancing distractedly into the candlelit darkness, and, then, two tables away, I see a little girl, about six years old, sitting beside a man and a woman I assume are her mom and dad.
“When are you going to die, Daddy?” she asks, squirming in her chair, while Daddy gnaws on a slab of steak, and the woman, probably her mommy, sips red wine. 
Like the child, I wait for an answer but hear only an idiotic cacophony of guffaws, gasps and giggles.
Frothy waves of chatter bubble around me. The sounds sizzle within my ears, static signals garbled, distortions resisting comprehension, bringing chaos and insanity. Once the music starts, the noxious, incoherent noises will diminish, but until then I try to block them out by thinking about songs I hope The Pain Portal (a Doors cover band) will perform.
Closing my eyes, I listen to the memories of my best friend and me singing “People Are Strange” and “Riders on the Storm,” our pure, clear, preadolescent voices a stark contrast to the cynicism and alienation we sensed in those songs. They were our anthems of estrangement, our protest against our shared humanity. Often, even now, I look at the people around me, as if they were characters in a surreal comedy/horror movie. I am not sure if I am in the movie or if I am the director. Maybe the little girl is the director, or maybe no one. Whatever happens is all part of a script the girl and I are trying to understand.
Like myself at her age, the girl is inquisitive, restless. Annoyed by the humdrum buzzing of human noises and the inattentive silence of her parents, she gets out of her chair and quickly walks towards the next table. Her mom and dad do not seem to notice or to care that she has strayed. Heads bowed, they focus attention on their phones while their child skips away in search of an answer.
“When are you going to die?” she chants in a sing-song voice, wandering from table to table. Eyes look up from ketchup-slathered fries, scrolling fingers pause, and foreboding hovers in the stale, grease-clogged air as she flashes by, white dress fluttering like the wings of a predatory dove.
          ***
“When are you going to die?” Sarah repeats her question as if it were a playful challenge, a game to see how the grown-ups react. She watches them scowl, and then she smiles, sensing their vulnerability, their shock, confusion, and fear. They don’t know the answers any more than she does. They are helpless, too.
          ***
I catch her eye and match her smile, remembering my morbid childhood. Mother Goose taught me ditties about disease, pockets full of posies, pustules oozing decay, and babies tossed from treetops as they sleep. Skeletal tricksters stalked my dreams, boogeyman reminders that death was always near, hiding underneath my flesh, its grinning skull laughing as skin and muscle give way to cold, hard, inflexible bone. I would marvel at my body, its miracles and mayhem--the sky-reaching lightness of dancing, the volcanic chaos of vomiting, the throbbing rivers of blood that kept me alive while the condescending, computer-like brain, with delusional omnipotence, planned and philosophized.
The girl has not yet grown old enough to distrust her body or feel lasting shame towards its messy functions. Delighting in its movements, its freedom and power, she twists and pirouettes. As if spinning a web of glimmering silk, she twirls past me in a frantic tarantella, her reddish-brown hair a brighter, more incandescent version of my own when I was a child.
Her frenzied steps seem to echo my heartbeat as if we are both fleeing from or towards some alluring yet frightening unknown. I feel a fluttering of wings press against my chest, dark angels coming home to roost.
A shrill, inhuman screech heralds their approach. Stricken by this hideous sound, the girl stops dancing, and the murmuring crowd is silenced.



          ***
The scream surges, halting her steps. It is the sound of rage and desolation, the fierce sobbing for something lost, never to return. She feels that sob ripping through her like a freshly opened wound as memories of her dog, Benny, flood her mind.
One moment Benny had been happily lying beside her, his tail wagging as she snuggled against his black fur and felt his white-bristled muzzle tickle her face; the next moment Daddy had grabbed Benny from her arms and taken him away. Daddy had come back, carrying Benny’s leash, but Benny was gone forever.
The vet gave Benny something to make him sleep, Daddy later explained, and God brought Benny to Heaven. 
She knew, though, that it wasn’t the vet or God to blame for Benny’s death; it was Daddy.
“Why did you take him away?” she cried.
“It was his time,” Daddy grumbled, looking down at the floor as if trying to avoid her gaze.
“But when is your time?” she angrily replied. “When are you going to die?”
He frowned and walked out the door, not answering her question.
The question, however, unlike Benny, did not die. It persisted, obsessing her.
“When are you going to die?” she asked Mommy, Aunt Teresa, and other people around her, craving an answer or at least a reaction of some kind. She wanted the question to infect others as it infected her. 
Even more troubling perhaps than “when” is “how.” Although Benny had been her first and only loved one who had died, so far, TV news stories and horror films had provided glimpses of death’s many forms and methods of attack.  What form would it take for her, she wonders. Would it come with the scream of an ambulance and an extravagant gushing of blood, or the stealthy, insidious whisper of lingering disease? Would it overpower her like a nightmare assassin with razor-sharp claws or gently engulf her with the smotheringly sweet anesthesia of a forever dream? 
The macabre scenarios whirl round and round in her imagination, making her dizzy. She needs Mommy to hold her close and tell her everything will be all right, even if Sarah knows it won’t be.  She wants Mommy all to herself, away from dog-killing Daddy, who isn’t even her real daddy.
 Slowly navigating her way through the maze of tables and chairs, she scrambles back up into her seat beside Mommy and watches Daddy, across from her, gulp the last of his beer.  He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin and turns his head towards the stage.
                      ***
Shrouded in yellow mist, the band swaggers onto the stage. The jaundiced haze obscures their features, preserving the mystique of deception. Without it, we would see the fallacy of imitation, flaccid flesh bulging over too-tight leather, balding heads shimmering under ill-fitting wigs.
The music, however, needs no illusion to thrive. Transcending its mortal performers, it evokes an atmosphere of sensual and spiritual menace.  Its winding, serpentine notes lead through lonely tunnels where strangers leer and sinister outcasts lurk. Debauchery summons, innocence succumbs, and madness possesses.
 
***
Mustard yellow fog enfolds her like a poisonous cloak, and the songs, unlike any she had ever heard, infuse her with a dangerous magic. Although she cannot understand all of the lyrics, they fascinate her. She senses an anger in them that seems strangely like her own. The droning, pounding vibrations of the music caress the tip of her spine and slither upwards, wriggling through spaces where “what if” thoughts, like naughty, abandoned toys, wait to be awakened.
Her anger towards “Daddy” rouses these thoughts from restless sleep. Even before he married her Mommy, back when he was just called “Gary,” she hated him. She hated him even more when he later insisted on being called “Daddy” and began complaining all the time about Benny being too big, too loud, too much trouble.  It was Daddy who was too much trouble, not Benny.
Imbued with hatred and dark imaginings, she stares at the candle on the table, watching the captive flame sway like a dancing jinn who could grant any wish she desired.  She knows what wish she will make.
Flames flicker within the candle’s glass container at my table, ghostly fingers clawing as the music, growling, snarling, wailing, conjures visions of rage and retribution.
Sarah whispers her wish to the flame jinn. She concentrates on it, demanding that it be granted. then turns towards her so-called “Daddy.” He is chewing on a tough piece of steak, his cheeks bulging, his jaws opening and closing like a rusty garage door.
“It is time,” she says softly as “Daddy” gasps and wheezes.  “It is your time now.”
                      ***
A son stalks and kills his father, bringing an end to the dream of vengeance. As the music concludes, I look at the table where the girl sits, clutching her mother. Her father slumps forward, gagging.  Death waits in the pause between breaths and gurgles. Then the question is answered.

Alison Armstrong Author Bio:
 
Alison Armstrong is the author of three literary horror novels (Revenance, Toxicosis, and Dark Visitations), a novella (Vigil and Other Writings), and a collection of writings addressing women and horror archetypes (Consorting with the Shadow: Phantasms and the Dark Side of Female Consciousness). Her work focuses on inner terror, stealthily lurking, solipsistic dread and nightmare flash epiphanies. Having obtained a Master of Arts in English, she has taught composition and literature at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, MI and Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. In addition to her novels and novella (available on Amazon and other online retailers), she has edited and contributed writings to Nature Triumphs: A Charity Anthology of Dark Speculative Literature and has had writings published in The Sirens Call as well as other horror anthologies. Further information is available on her Web site: https://horrorvacui.us