"It's My Job"

Ruth was lost in the rhythm of kneading the dough, timing the folds and turns to the gentle tick of the wall-clock across the room. She might have heard the grind of the laboring engine outside, and the hiss of steam from under the car’s hood, but she paid them no heed until there came a soft knock on her door. Then she looked up, out the window: past the sparse grass of her front yard, pulled to the side of the cracked asphalt of Mountain Road, was a rusty sedan enveloped in a cloud of steam.

She sighed. She had too much to do today to get involved in someone else’s car trouble. She had bread to bake, and then probably berry-picking after, because jam did not make itself, and the shelves in the cabinets were not even half full yet. Nevertheless, she tossed a tea-towel over her dough and dusted her floury hands on her apron, leaving blurred white handprints, then answered the door.

On the doorstep was an old woman, wrapped in a crochet cardigan despite the harsh summer heat. Her irises, blue and bright as the boiling sky above, were surrounded by clabbermilk-colored whites. Beneath the deep, dark hollows of her eyesockets were wrinkles, pale, dusty, and delicate as cobwebs, hanging from her cheekbones. Her hair looked to Ruth like the ancient quilt-batting tucked somewhere in the attic.

“Hello,” the old woman said, opening her mouth just enough to reveal toffee-brown teeth. “I’m so sorry to bother you, dear, but that’s my car back there,” —she pointed to the foundered car— “It broke down coming up the hill. I don’t have a cellular phone. Do you have a landline I could use, so I could call a tow truck? I’ll only be a minute.”

Ruth’s impatience suddenly melted away, and was replaced with pity. She couldn’t leave an old woman stranded with no hope of help on a day as hot as this. “Of course!” she answered quickly. “Please, come in.” She ushered the old woman inside, feeling a little pang of embarrassment as she held open the door: she hadn’t realized the paint had peeled so badly; flakes were drifting down even as the woman stepped into the kitchen.

“I’ll tell you what,” Ruth said, “I know a towing company. Why don’t you sit here while I call them for you? I made some iced tea this morning; I could get you a glass while you wait.”

“That would be very nice, dear; thank you.”

Five minutes later, Ruth joined the old woman at the table. “The tow truck should be here in a couple of hours. The man said it sounds like the radiator overheated. I hope everything turns out okay,” she said.

The old woman nodded. "Sounds right," she said, her voice light but without any vigor, like a feather that long ago fell from the wing of a bird. “It’s over a hundred degrees out there today, and the roads up the mountains are so steep.” The kitchen slipped into silence, and something about that puzzled Ruth. Then she realized what was amiss: the wall-clock had stopped.

She reached for her glass of iced tea, but then nearly dropped it: there was an oily sheen around the ice cubes floating on the surface. “Is your tea alright, ma’am?” she asked.

The old woman took a long, relishing sip. “Excellent, dear,” she said. As she tilted the glass upright again, Ruth saw that the liquid was viscose.

“Good,” she said vaguely, pushing her own glass further away. Silence swarmed the room once more, and Ruth felt suffocated by it. “So, where are you from?” she asked, noting how desperate her own voice seemed.

“I was coming up from Chestnut Crest,” the old woman answered; that was the borough north of the mountains. “I have a painting studio there.”

“Oh, you paint?”

In reply, the woman dug into the pocket of her cardigan. Two hands, somehow rodent-like, burrowed in there, and Ruth heard the deep rustle of canvas. The woman pulled out a roll and unfurled it. “It’s me and my friends, dancing,” she said, her burning eyes peering from the top of the canvas.

The room seemed almost to melt away around the painting. A thick carpet of vibrant grass, glazed gold in places by the light of an unseen sun, was trod on by a circle of four figures. Their interlocked hands reached up for the sky as their feet fluttered over the ground. In the center of the circle of dancers was a fire, the tame kind that might sit outside a tent, patiently waiting for hotdogs or marshmallows.

Then the picture changed.

The ground was now dry and lifeless dirt. No more light; the background was black, the paint still sticky. There were no dancers. Where they had been, the canvas was slashed deeply, fibres showing through the paint like bone through the flesh of some corpse.

And in the center was—

Ruth looked away, her eyes averting themselves the way they did when she tried to look at the sun.

“Isn’t it nice?” the old woman asked.

“Very…” Ruth managed, the word not so much said as pushed out. She could not turn her face toward the old woman again, but her peripheral vision was able to get a hint of what lay at the heart of the painting: there was a crater in the black ground, and flames issued from it, sending out tendrils of curling smoke. There may have been something in the fire, but she did not want to look any closer; she did not want to see any more. Instead she looked at the counter, to the dough she had set aside…only now, the tea-towel she’d thrown over it was covered in dark splotches.

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “What happened to my dough?”

“Did it go bad, dear?” asked the old woman. “That happens sometimes.”

As if in a dream, Ruth rose from her chair and walked toward the counter. The air there did not smell of yeast; it was acrid and toxic. The towel, she realized, was covered in mold: she could actually see it spreading, green and pink spots growing like strange moss. She edged a finger under a fold of the towel and raised it up off of the dough, which was now coated in soft gray fuzz. Spores of mold whirled up into the air in the towel’s wake. There was a stench of flooded basements and abandoned sinks. She turned her head away, coughing, and spied something like frost on the windowpanes: no, it wasn’t frost, but mildew. The view outside was already obscured, and the light had taken on an odd, filtered quality. From the curtains came a miasma akin to that of a used shroud.

“I– I don’t understand,” Ruth stammered. “How did this happen? What’s going on? Did you do this?”

There was a chuckle behind her, but it couldn’t have been the old woman; surely her chuckle wouldn’t be so deep and harsh and loud—

But it was only the old woman at the table, which Ruth, turning sharply, saw was now coated in a half-inch of dust. “I did,” she answered simply, in her familiar voice, soft and rustling with age.

“But how? Why?”

“It’s my job. My friends have their jobs; this is mine. Now, about the painting, what do you say? Do you want it? It’s free. Consider it a gift.”

Ruth inhaled to speak, but all that came out was another hacking cough, and she could taste the mildew on her tongue. She didn’t want the painting at all; she wanted to tell the old woman to leave, to scream at her to get out of the house, but the words stuck in her throat and festered there. She couldn’t move her feet. She couldn’t even look away as the old woman leapt from the table, holding the canvas outstretched in front of her, and strode over to the far wall between the cabinets. From behind the doors came the muffled sound of crinkling metal; the image of all the canned peaches and pears and strawberry jam down there sending up bubbles from around darkening fruits suddenly flashed before Ruth’s eyes. Sure enough, as the woman pressed the canvas against the wall as if to see how it would look, the cabinet doors jumped, and the sound of shattering glass and splattering fruit shot through the air as jars began to explode. A moment later, Ruth’s nostrils were burned by the odor of fermentation. She whimpered, and finally managed through clenched teeth, “Stop…please, stop…”

Again there was the chuckle, and this time Ruth could see that it did come from the old woman’s mouth. Behind those brown teeth, something was glittering. She watched in horror as two antennae poked out of the woman’s mouth, and then a cockroach crawled out and over her chin. Maggots fell from her nose. Her white hair writhed as worms wriggled down her wrinkled forehead. Then the chuckle erupted into a cackle, and hundreds of cockroaches began to swarm from the woman’s mouth, crawling over her nose, her eyes, and falling to the floor in a flood that swept towards Ruth.

At last, Ruth was unfrozen, and now she did not speak or scream: she ran. She bolted for the door, nearly colliding with it, and then pounced on the doorknob, yanked the door open, and flew outside, hands outstretched in front of her. She veered away from the road, where the woman’s car still sat, although had she stopped to look at it, she would have seen that it had rusted over entirely. Once she was nearly to the road, she staggered to a stop and wretched, hands on her knees. Her apron felt clammy. Where there had been floury handprints, the cotton was now dark with rot.

And then she noticed her fingertips had gone grey. Raising them to her face, she saw that they were dotted with circles of black mold.

“Well, Pete, this here’s the place, but even if that ever was a car, ain’t nobody been driving it for a while,” said Larry, as he closed the tow truck’s door. Pete nodded, gazing at the heap of rust and broken glass lying halfway on the road.

“Should we knock?” asked Pete.

Larry frowned for a moment. He didn’t really want to go up to the house; in fact, he didn’t really want to do anything but get back in the truck and get away. “You go on ahead,” he answered finally.

As Pete approached the door, which now only held a few stray flakes of paint, he saw that it stood slightly ajar. But this was the country; he knew plenty of folks in the country got lazy about locking doors, so maybe this house had just gotten extra lazy. “Hello?” he called. When that didn’t work, he peered in the window.

He realized he was looking at a kitchen, but he would never have dared to eat anything prepared in there. The wallpaper was coated in mold. From every metal hinge, pull, knob and nail dripped a gush of rust like dried blood. Across the room, there was what looked like a massive bullet-wound in the plaster itself; he decided that it had once been a wall-clock. Parts of the dark floor seemed to move, and he thought they might have been clots of maggots. And on the side wall, stuck there in the filth, was a painting—

But then there was a waft of rancid air, and his eyes began to water from the stench. He quickly turned away and began to jog back to the truck. 

Halfway there, his boot went through something that cracked and rattled. Flies buzzed into the air to hover around his face. He looked down.

He was standing on the pantleg of a mouldering pair of jeans. A few feet further was an apron, smudged with black handprints like an ancient mark on a cave wall. It lay over a ribcage, and above that was a skull, darkened with mold, maggots, and fly-dirt. Lichen exploded from the skull’s eyesockets and agape jaw.

Pete didn’t stop to scream. He leapt forward, taking care not to land on the bones of an outstretched hand, and sprinted to the truck.

Larry looked up and frowned. “Hey, what’s with the hurry—”

“Wrong place,” Pete panted, opening the passenger door and vaulting into the seat. “This place is wrong, wrong, wrong. Let’s go.”

Larry didn’t need telling twice, and his relief was immense as he pulled onto the road and started heading back to town.

“We gotta call the cops,” Pete said finally. “There was a dead body. Something bad happened in that house. I mean, look at my hands: they’re actually shaking…” He held them up for inspection.

Seeing the green specks under the fingernails and in the wrinkles, both he and Larry said the same thing at the same time: “Is that mold?”