Todd F. Elliott is a research assistant at the University of Texas at Galveston where he studies the effects of respiratory syncytial virus on the immune system. This story won third place in the North Texas Professional Writers' Association in their 1999 Fiction Contest.
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Across the Way
by Todd F. Elliott
The little girl stood in the third floor window of the haunted house next door and stared in at Elissa, as if to say, Pull yourself together. Pink barrettes held back her blonde hair and matched the fringe of her yellow dress. She pouted through the glass. Her ivory skin wrinkled into a frown.
Pull yourself together and do something before he kills you.
Elissa gasped in pain as Craig pinched her side with his blunt fingers. "Getting too fat," he said. He knelt behind her. Beads of sweat dripped down his stubbled chin and fell onto her back. He looped the thin belt in his right hand as he forced her onto her hands and knees.
She hated this. It sickened her, angered her, depressed her; but what was she going to do? Who to turn to? Nobody. If she'd known Craig would turn to this, she'd never have married him.
"Who's your daddy?" Craig hissed. Foamy spittle landed on her back.
Elissa gazed up through the east window to the little girl in the house across the way and prayed for a sign that this would end before it got worse. Please God let him have a stroke or a heart attack. Make him drop dead. The little girl across the way shook her head, as if to say, "You have to do it."
Crack. The belt etched a red pattern across her back. "Who's your daddy?"
"You are," Elissa said as she faded away into the dark. Her mind detached from her body, and she floated away from the madness. Through the window, the brilliant orange sun lit the western wall of 1609 Market Street, the house next door.
Despite the heat and humidity, houses in this part of Galveston huddled together like penguins in the Antarctic wind, some as close as three feet. Over a hundred and fifty years old, 1609 Market, a modest Greek Revival, stood three stories tall. It was so near that you could see and hear everything from across the way. Elissa knew this because she grew up in 1609.
Twenty years ago, she lived there with her mother and father. When she had stared at 1607 from her window, she saw the barren floor space of the third floor bedroom through the grimy, opaque glass. In the evenings, the empty room came alive with shadows chasing and wrestling each other, fighting and cursing: a naked soul defending blows from a tormentor. When the night fell, cries whimpered through the dead air between the houses. It terrified her, but she had said nothing, never even cried out to her mother or father. She kept it to herself and forgot about it, at least until the day she moved into the haunted house.
The day after her fifteenth birthday, the door bell had rung and a blue uniformed man stood in the doorway, rain dribbling from his hat and coat. I'm sorry, ma'am, but... Her parents died on impact, crushed by an eighteen wheeler that ran a red light on Port Industrial and Fifty-first Street. She spent three years in a foster home, running from her foster father, who tried to get into her pants. The day she turned eighteen, she left Galvatraz and landed a job in a Houston strip club. Those years were a blur, mostly sucking wads of cheap cocaine up her nose. She came back to straighten out. Elissa found work at a cozy cafe on Broadway where she found a lot of new friends, one of whom turned out to be the tall slim cop who'd come to slip her the bad news when she was fifteen. Craig used that to pick her up. Say, don't I know you?
After a year, she moved in with him at 1609 Market Street and she felt as if she'd come full circle -- almost. Only three feet separated the east window of her haunted house to the brilliant glaring reflection in the west window of her childhood home. She hadn't recognized her childhood home because it had degenerated into a ramshackle dump. The role of the houses had reversed over the last twenty years. Now, her childhood home was the decrepit, haunted house across the way. Once the ghosts haunted 1607 Market but now one plagued 1609. The little girl. She had to be a ghost, because the house was vacant.
Craig started going downhill just a year before, his playful slaps started drawing blood. It was the house. It cost more to renovate than he had predicted, and it became an enemy to him. She also had not become pregnant. Several doctors had determined that she was infertile, not Craig. It all became her fault. A chlamydia infection she had in her wild days. Craig rubbed it in. No little tykes in the backyard playing football, no high school graduation and no grandchildren. If she had known when she was eighteen what she knew now, she'd never done any of that.
She wished she had someone to turn to. She hadn't had anybody to be there for her since her parents walked out the door that day almost twenty years ago. If she had only known then, she could have stopped her parents from leaving her that rainy day in September to go to the mainland.
Craig knelt back away from her. Sweat rolled down from his shaved crown and across his stubbled chin. His lips parted as he exhaled from exertion and picked up his T-shirt. He cleaned himself and tossed the cotton shirt at her head.
"Wake up," he said. He rose to his feet and pulled up his underwear.
Craig slapped her head with his knuckles. "What the fuck's wrong with you, dummy? You better clean up this mess and get dinner ready unless you want another round."
Elissa ignored him. He followed her eyes to the window.
"Quit dreaming about the past. Can't do nothing for you now." He turned away and stomped to the door. "You got ten minutes." He slammed the door shut and locked it.
Naked, Elissa rose to her feet and stepped to the window. Unashamed and still in the disconnected daze, she pressed up against the east window; the summer sun had heated the glass enough to toast her glistening skin. She raised her hand to the little girl across the way--a plea for help. Her head fell forward against the ancient glass. Below, between the short span that separated the two houses, a six-foot tall wrought-iron fence delineated the property line. Craig had been so proud of his fence and the restoration of 1607 Market.
Elissa lifted her head back to the window she had gazed through so many years before. The little girl looked straight at her now. She waved.
Elissa -- naked and battered -- smiled and waved back.
The little girl beckoned her. Come to me.
Elissa bit her lip. No way. She had enough ghosts in her life.
The blonde head nodded. Ivory white skin stretched back revealing a shiny mouthful of baby teeth. The little girl pointed at the glass and moved her hand. She wrote kindergarten block letters in the dust on the window.
Elissa nodded. Yes. That was it. The little girl was right, but before Elissa could respond, she vanished into the darkness. Only her message remained: Kill him.
Monday night the sun came down slow over the house, drawing out the shadows as it fell further in the sky. When shade of 1607 knocked the glare off the window next door, Elissa glanced up from the dusty wooden floor. The little girl stood behind the glass.
Craig pumped away behind Elissa, cussing with each thrust, a different epithet, or new combination, or sometimes and unintelligible concoction of profanity, as if a knot of demons had infiltrated his body and forced him to speak in unholy tongues.
Elissa stared back down at the floor. Sweat fell from her nose and spattered onto the dusty wood slats. Craig exploded behind her, gasped, and shouted out a string of blasphemous words. He collapsed on his knees and sighed.
Elissa inched forward to the stale pile of clothes that sat on the floor before her. She had to act fast. For the next two minutes, Craig would slump in exhaustion. As she slid her hand beneath a stained T-shirt, her fingers found the wooden handle of the butcher knife she had hidden there the previous Saturday morning.
Her fingers wrapped around the aged wood riveted to the blade. Heavy in her hand, the knife slide out from beneath its hiding place. The sun gleamed on the steel--the reflection of the window. She had sharpened the edge Saturday morning when Craig had slipped out for thirty-six holes of golf.
Her heart fluttered as she held it to her breast. Kill him. She turned around to Craig, who drowsed as his held his most prized possession in his fist. Elissa reared her arm back and prepared for a forward jab as Craig watched her through his half-opened slits.
"What the fuck are you doing, fatty?"
Elissa screamed and thrust the butcher knife at him. It punctured his skin, glanced off a rib, sunk into his left lung, and slid in all the way to the handle. Craig echoed her scream. They knelt face to face and screamed together as they stared into each other's eyes--his scream one of pain, and hers one of rage. For an instant, their roles reversed.
Their cries dwindled: passion and pain died at different times.
Craig brought a rock-hard fist into her cheek, and she rolled away from him. A low rumble--the feral noise of a rabid animal--developed in his throat. As he sunk his teeth into his lower lip, he extracted the knife from his flesh. Blood issued out with each heartbeat as he stood.
The growling ramble of curses poured from his mouth as he approached her and held the knife in his fist.
Elissa got to her feet and stumbled backwards towards the east window. Across the way, the little girl unlatched the window of the haunted house and slid it open.
"You think you know how to use a knife?" Craig asked.
Elissa bumped into the windowsill. She reached behind her to unlatch the window, but the latch had been painted over ten times. She found a metal folding chair leaned up against the wall. She picked it up.
"I get knives pulled on me all the time." The grin on Craig's face widened revealing a blood-soaked smile. He grunted as he tried to exhale, but a gurgle escaped the incision in his chest and blew out a bubble of blood.
Elissa lifted the chair. Its four metal legs folded together shattered the ancient panes of glass. The fragments fell three stories to the sidewalk below and shattered into dust. Craig advanced. He held the wound with his left hand, but blood poured from between his fingers.
Elissa pushed the chair through the window and knocked out the wooden framework. Everything fell to the wrought iron fence and sidewalk below. She turned to the window and hopped up on the sill. Jagged glass shards pierced her feet.
"It's a long way down," Craig said. He took another step.
"It's not too far across," she answered. Elissa turned to the house across the way and prepared to jump. The little girl in the yellow dress and pink barrettes beckoned her at the open window. She smiled and waved her forward, willing her to jump.
Craig stood perplexed, staring though the window at the shitty decrepit house. A window laid open and obscene, like an empty socket in a dead man's eye.
Elissa flexed her legs and pushed off the window as Craig raced to stop her. Naked and bruised, she soared through the dusty summer wind. The dying sunbeams that sliced across the housetops held her aloft across the way, over the hard concrete sidewalk and the sharp wrought iron fence. Elissa reached for the cracked windowsill where the little girl waited.
Craig held the knife as he rushed after her. The old house would provide no protection for her. He planted his foot on the windowsill. A two-inch glass shard bit into the arch of his foot before it broke off inside his flesh.
Elissa screamed as her hands found the windowsill. She jerked to a stop and raked her bare feet down the house's siding. As she tried to gain a foothold and raise herself up into the window, she displaced old paint and boards.
The scream echoed in the small space between the two houses. Craig stumbled out the window and plummeted three stories to the wrought iron fence below. Black spikes pierced his chest in a diagonal from his left shoulder to his right hip. The butcher knife rattled on the sidewalk.
Horrified, Elissa reached up into the window and found a hand trying to pull her in. The little girl. Elissa gasped as she pulled herself up and over the windowsill and into her childhood home.
The little girl disappeared. Beneath Elissa's feet, the soiled carpet brightened, and the cracks in the walls vanished. Light streamed in through the clean glass and danced on the immaculate white walls.
Elissa turned to the window and peered through to the haunted house across the way. Through the reflection of her blond hair, pink barrettes and yellow dress in the west window of her bedroom, she could see the shadows in the empty walkway between the houses. The dark silhouette of a man impaled on a ghostly fence fell on the rotting wooden siding of the house across the way. She ran from her room and yelled, "Mommy! Daddy!"
She knew; she remembered.