The Old People
Susan
Savage Lee
Cecile
Swanson dried off her soft, fleshy hands with a nearly threadbare dish towel,
dreaming of dolls, especially the scent of their perfectly coiffed hair, a blend
of lavender and vanilla she’d made herself. A
look of peace passed through her eyes before they became troubled again. A
white blur had shifted by the kitchen window, as she stared out of it,
contemplating dolls instead of the blackness of night. When she leaned forward,
squinting her rheumy eyes that had seen nearly eighty summers, she glimpsed the
speck of white moving from right to left before disappearing out of her range
of vision. In the living room, her husband, Harold, watched the football game,
the volume turned up because he refused to wear hearing aids.
“Harold, I think that damn
Cuttler dog is in the yard again,” she proclaimed with disapproval, her thin
lips stretched into a tight line. If the dog and other pests kept digging and
eating up their garden, how would they afford to feed themselves?
Cecile’s thoughts stopped in
mid-sentence as a slow, heavy knock sounded at the front door. Between each of
the three knocks, there was a pause as if the person on the other side wasn’t
certain whether or not they really wanted to announce their presence.
“Can you get that, dear?” Cecile
called into the other room, still not receiving an answer from Harold. Half the
time she didn’t know what she needed him for since she took care of the house
and chores, while he stared listlessly at the TV screen, dreaming about other
worlds. At least, that’s what she
thought he did.
When
he still didn’t
respond,
she cursed an uncouth holiday like Halloween when bratty children already high
on candy wanted even more just to annoy their parents later.
“At least, we never had any of
our own,” Cecile muttered to herself as she made her way to the front door,
dish towel discarded next to the sink, hip joints stiff and creaking with each
step. She unlocked the door, half expecting to see a group of children dressed
as fairies or vampires that she could scold, but there weren’t any. The problem
was no one stood there at all.
Cecile
took a tentative step forward and poked her head into the windy night,
wondering if she’d only imagined
the knocking or if it had come from a commercial between plays.
It must be a prank.
After all, the Swansons
weren’t well liked in the
neighborhood. Most of the families who lived around them hated the sight of the
sagging porch with its white peeling paint along once-stately columns. The
Swansons had lived in the house on Arbor Street for so long that they had seen
it in its prime before falling into decline and then gentrifying back again to
its original state when only wealthy families were allowed to live there.
It must be kids, Cecile
thought to herself as she plodded
back to the kitchen.
Before she could resume
pouring a porridge made from
leftovers into tiny plastic containers, the knocking sounded again with more
rigor than it had the first time. Cecile froze in place, slowly turning her
head, the tendons in her neck creaking with the effort. The front door stood
there, seemingly mocking her in its blankness. Cecile began the journey back to
it, although this time more slowly. It wasn’t her arthritis that gave her
pause, but the authoritative nature of this round of knocking. It was as if the
person on the other side was intent on entering.
“Damn it all to hell!” Harold
shouted as he pushed himself out of his recliner with some effort before
journeying to the front door. “Can’t
a man watch a game in peace?”
Cecile took the opportunity
to stand behind his easy chair,
one hand perched on the faded, worn material that had once dazzled their
neighbors back when they still had friends. It must be a prank, she told
herself once again, although the explanation was losing its charge like a light
bulb on the verge of blinking out.
Harold flung open the door
to a burst of wind and nothing
else. Like Cecile before him, he poked his head outside, looking first left and
then right, before slamming the door shut again.
“Who was it?” Cecile asked in a
timid voice. She could count on one hand how many times she’d
been truly frightened, this being one of them.
“Damn kids,” Harold replied
before dropping back into his easy chair with a grunt.
“But did you see them?” she asked
as she came around to face him. A part of her wanted to stand in front of the
TV to force him to pay attention to her, while another part wanted to smash in
its screen so he would never ignore her again. She did neither.
“Naw,” he said with a dismissive
flip of his left hand.
“I don’t
like this,” Cecile began, knowing that if she voiced her growing fear, it would
become real and tangible. “What if they know?”
“They don’t
know shi––” Harold began, a loud knock truncating his response.
Cecile watched in horror
as Harold got up from the easy
chair with even more difficulty than he had the first time, intent on answering
the door. When he was young, he’d been a
handsome sailor with a trim waist and piercing blue eyes that softened when she
smiled or laughed. He’d found
her at a diner when she was only seventeen and he’d
not left her side since. But the years had gone from tough to hard and now the
money they’d once relied on from Harold’s
pension had seemingly dried up to a trickle. It would’ve been one thing if she was
still seventeen or even
twenty-seven facing the prospect of poverty, but being old and destitute filled
her with panic as she watched stability slip between her fingers like spilled
wine.
“Don’t
answer it,” Cecile pleaded as she watched Harold’s
hand begin to turn the old brass doorknob that needed replacing ten years ago. “Please, don’t!”
“I don’t
know what’s gotten into you tonight––” he
began once again after the third knock sounded and he flung open the door,
ready to insult the person on the other side.
Cecile’s hand
reached up to cover her cheeks and nose as she watched the black-clad figure
cross the threshold, grabbing Harold by the neck as he did so. At first, she
thought he was faceless until her poor sight made sense of the porcelain mask
the figure was wearing, its mouth shaped into a contented smile like a cat
curled before a fireplace.
Cecile began backing up
until her stately hips bounced
against Harold’s chair at the dining
room table, the one that he always forgot to push in after they finished
dinner. The sudden stop caused her to lose her balance. As she fell onto the
linoleum floor that once gleamed under the antique crystal chandelier, she had
a moment to question why this was happening to her and her husband, two old
people who kept to themselves, until her head bounced against the floor and the
world went as black as the assailant’s
clothing.
***
In the dark, once she got
used to her pulsing fear, she had
a lot of time to think. Cecile knew she wasn’t in the basement, otherwise, she
would’ve heard the chains that kept the
dolls in place beneath the drafty windows. She could be in another room in the
house, although she wasn’t sure how it had been made to be so dark, if this was
the case. This might be a different house altogether. All she knew was the
silence of this dark place as she tried to get comfortable in clothes that
itched. The only problem was her hands were tied in front of her with something
that chafed like rope.
Her mind drifted from fears
about the man in the porcelain
mask and the call of the fantasy world she’d come to
rely upon more and more.
What seemed like just a
few years ago but what was really
decades, Cecile had been beautiful and she’d known
it. As a girl, she’d taken great
pleasure in her dolls, finding them the most fashionable outfits while always
offering something new with them. She colored their faces with her mother’s make-up
and when she got old enough, she did the same
to herself. Although men looked at her, she saw the only thing they wanted
which she wasn’t willing to give. They became passing faces, walking through
her life for minutes or seconds, with nothing to offer but captivity. Until
Harold.
She used to tell him that
he was made of light after the
first time she noticed him in the diner booth, sunlight bouncing off his silver
rings. She’d never seen rings like that
before. As he glittered while pushing runny scrambled eggs around his plate
with a fork turned sideways, she felt the pull of him, bringing her across the
room to stand right in front of the booth, a pad of paper in one hand. It was
like floating across water, sunlight dancing all around her.
Cecile heard a familiar
sound that disrupted her thoughts.
It was the thin chains that protected her dolls from the horrors of the world.
That world only offered disappointment, while this one––the world of her
creation filled with fashionable scarves whispering as she ran her hands over
them, or rose bushes lining the front step and filling the neighborhood with
their scent–– had been a perfect, orderly world until it wasn’t.
Was the man hurting her
dolls? Maybe he would take them
with him. A tiny moan escaped her parched lips at the thought of the empty
space along the wall, the lovely scented dolls vanished into the night as part
of a cruel prank. Then what would she do? She would be alone, she told herself
in a voice that hissed in the now quiet darkness, the chains having been
silenced.
But there’s still Harold,
the practical part of her mind told her. Yes, there’s
still Harold, she replied to that matronly voice she’d
always hated. That voice told her dolls were stupid for a woman her age.
That voice made her do all the chores before she could indulge in the
rich world of her imagination. That voice always made her suffer for a
man, no matter how tired she was.
Cecile hated that voice.
It reminded her of the first
time Harold quit looking at
her with softness and care. Instead, he stared through her as if he had no
other uses for her. Maybe he didn’t.
Once upon a time, he’d really
been something. He’d moved his way up
the ladder at the electric company, to the point that they could purchase their
own TV and car, Cecile screaming with delight each time he bought her something
new. Sometimes, he would come home in the afternoon and bring her a cupcake
with frosting an inch high or a pair of pumps that she would wear around the
house, dancing to Elvis Presley and Dion records. It was like being a child
again, wishing for the next day and all it would bring. But it didn't last.
Harold eventually retreated
into the basement to listen to
country music records, old singers who wailed about poverty and lost loves. He
quit bringing her sweet-smelling gifts or sultry ones. As the distance grew
between them, Cecile sat upstairs, one hand resting on the doorknob as she
tried to find a reason to go to the basement and talk to him. Instead, she
began her trips to the basement to fill the wall with her dolls until Harold couldn’t
stand the sight of them.
“Crazy old bird,” he’d muttered the last time he’d
gone down there. From them on, he found his spot among the flattened couch
cushions that were shaped like the Swansons. With each passing year, the TV got
louder and louder, although Cecile quit noticing after a while. She spent her
time in the basement, changing her dolls’ clothing, wiping
their faces with warm cloths, and lighting candles so that the waxy scents
would rub off onto the dolls’ clothes––all
chiffon or taffeta, silk or satin. In the midst of the pots left under certain
parts of the upstairs ceiling to catch water, or the white paint that kept
getting ticketed by the neighbors as part of their cruel insistence that the
Swansons didn’t belong, Cecile had her dolls. They didn’t laugh or tease her,
call her names, or make her feel like a fallen beauty queen, replaced by the
world of television screens.
In my own house, Cecile
thought, as a tiny sliver of light
appeared beneath the door that sat not four feet away. The pale light lit up
the space in front of her, showing her the old dresser her dad had once given
to her mother after seeing it in a newspaper ad. It was nicked and scratched,
but in the dark, it looked perfectly fine.
Slowly, the door to her
old sewing room opened with a
squeal. A figure stood there, outlined by the hallway light, his face covered
in shadows, but she knew who he was––the man in the mask. He wore a cape like
superheroes had, although it was black like Dracula’s.
He approached her, bending over to reach the armrests of the chair she sat in,
before pulling it roughly, the wheels at the bottom screaming in protest. The
man pulled her into the hallway where she saw her dolls lined up against the
wall, their make-up smeared from crying. He waved one arm at them like a
magician showing the audience he didn’t have anything hidden in his hand when
he really did. The unchained dolls regarded her with contempt as they filed
past her, headed toward the family room and the front door. The man in the mask
watched them go, his permanent smile emblazoned across the porcelain.
When Cecile started to cry,
he bent down again, wagging one
finger in front of her as he would with a naughty child. Now that the hallway
was empty except for the strange cloaked figure bent at his waist, Cecile could
make out Harold leaning against the wall, a thin trickle of blood coming from
his forehead. He had passed out with his mouth open. Cecile looked back at the
man. He resumed wagging his finger until he stood up, his cape rustling like
taffeta. Then he began a slow, graceful walk down the hallway like a
Shakespearian actor finishing a scene.
“Please don’t
go!” Cecile shouted after him. “Please don’t
leave me,” she screamed until her throat went dry and hoarse.
The only problem was, she
didn’t know who she was speaking
to––the man, the dolls, or someone else altogether. Maybe she hadn’t known this
for a long time. Maybe.
***
Susan Savage Lee is a
Professor of Spanish at Jefferson Community and Technical College. She has
published in academic journals in the United States and Europe. Her short
stories have appeared in Bewildering
Stories and
Aphelion. She writes horror, speculative fiction, and
psychological thrillers.
