Bad Glass полностью

There was a narrow hallway on the other side of the door, leading all the way to the front of the house. Taylor was standing in its center, facing away from me. There was a blanket strung across the corridor at about breast height—a makeshift clothesline barrier, partitioning the hallway into a number of smaller spaces—and she was peering over its edge, down toward the floor on the far side. She was talking to somebody, somebody hidden out of sight, and gesturing with both hands. I couldn’t make out most of what she was saying. Only a couple of her words, raised loud, made it through the doorway: “not staying,” “not safe,” and a single, pleading “please.”

There was an answering voice from the person on the other side of the blanket, but it was low and calm, and I couldn’t make out a single word.

It was strange, this scene, and I couldn’t tell what was going on. Who was she talking to? One of her parents? And why here, in the middle of the hallway? And what was up with the partition?

I held my breath and tried to concentrate on the muffled sound of Taylor’s voice, trying to pick meaning out of that muted cadence. But there was nothing there, just the dull rumble of argumentative voices, or, rather, the rumble of one argumentative voice set against the reassuring calm of a patient and soothing one. This didn’t go on for too long. After a couple of minutes, the conversation ceased, and Taylor was left standing there, vibrating with mute energy. Then, in a gesture of complete frustration, she pulled the blanket aside and stormed toward the front of the house.

As she made her way to the front door, pushing aside a second barrier, the blanket closest to me slipped from its clothesline and fell to the floor, spilling with a quick, fluid motion. And what it revealed … well, I actually jumped at the sight, and my hands, pressed flat against the screen door, bounced wildly off the metal barrier.

It was a man, merged with the hardwood floor. The top half of his body looked perfectly normal: a Middle Eastern man dressed in a white button-down shirt. But the shirt stopped midbelly, at the floor, and the bottom half of his body was gone. His hands moved against the floor and walls, slow, languid, and completely insensate. His head lolled, and a line of spittle spilled from his lower lip. I couldn’t see his eyes—his head was moving, and he was over a dozen feet away—but I could imagine them rolled back inside his skull.

There was a woman seated next to the man’s stunted body, a white woman in her fifties, propped up in a comfortable nest of pillows. Taylor’s mother? She jumped at the sound of my hands bouncing off the screen door, and a startled cry escaped her throat. Her eyes widened when she saw me standing at the window, looking in. With one hand, she reached out and grabbed the man’s shoulder comfortingly; the other started scrambling toward the blanket on the floor, trying to reassemble her makeshift blind.

“Taylor!” she cried. “Taylor!” Now the woman’s voice was loud enough for me to hear, frantic and shrill and filled with a primal, instinctual fear. “What is this? What’s going on?”

I looked up and saw Taylor towering over her parents. Her eyes were locked on me, narrowed and filled with a cold, biting anger. She wasn’t moving. My presence here had frozen her solid.

Her mother continued to struggle with the blanket, trying desperately to throw it up and over the clothesline. She worked one-handed, refusing to release her grip on her husband. “Help,” she said, turning to look back at Taylor. “Please, Taylor, for the love of God, help!” Her words came out frantic and disjointed. There were tears running down her cheeks.

Finally, Taylor stepped forward and put the blanket back in place, carefully draping it over the clothesline. Once it was back up—and her parents hidden from view—Taylor pointed at me and gestured me away from the window. It was an angry, dismissive shooing gesture. And at that moment, I swear, there was genuine hate in her eyes. At that moment, I think she couldn’t fucking stand me.

I backed away, horrified.

What had I done?

I sat down in the dirt and waited for Taylor to appear. There was a frigid wind blowing down from the north, and the clouds were getting darker overhead, a dense slate-gray weight perched above the city. It felt like snow.

I didn’t know what was going to happen with Taylor. I’d looked in on something private here, a secret, and didn’t know how she was going to react.

Her parents. Her father, melted into the floor, consumed by the city.

I thought it was unheard of—this phenomenon—I thought it was something that I alone had been carrying around. I thought it was mine. But Taylor had seen Weasel; she’d seen his fingers. She was a part of it now. I’d infected her.

Maybe it would be for the best if she pushed me away. Maybe I was a cancer that needed to be excised from her life.