Soft Furnishings

The pillow had been trying to scare Claire for three months.

Not kill her. It had standards.

One decent scream would do. A dropped mug would be acceptable, as would a startled curse or a nervous glance over one shoulder after hearing something that should not have been there.

Instead, Claire fluffed it every morning.

"There."

Her palms struck both sides with brisk affection until two pounds of polyester cinched around whatever had awakened inside. Humility came included with the stuffing.

Across the room, the porcelain doll watched from a glass cabinet. Her left eye clicked shut, opened, and clicked shut again.

The pillow despised her. "Oh, very impressive."

Claire stopped. From the kitchen came the low grind of the refrigerator compressor. "What was that?"

The pillow gathered itself until its zipper trembled.

"Buuuuu…"

Claire bent closer. Everything inside the pillow strained toward the tiny opening between the zipper teeth.

"…uuuuh."

Her eyebrows pinched. A weak stream of air leaked between the zipper teeth.

"Damn seam."

She tossed it back onto the couch.

Agatha's painted smile remained unchanged.

"Remarkable performance."

"Shut up."

"I particularly admired the flatulence."

"You live in a cabinet."

"And yet they hear me."

That was the part the pillow hated most.

Three knocks sounded from the hallway, crisp and respectable. Claire turned to find nobody there, which seemed to be all a competent haunting required.

Beside the coat rack, the antique mirror clouded from within. Letters formed across the glass where no breath had touched it.

GET OUT.

Claire backed away.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," said the pillow.

The mirror cleared.

"You're embarrassing yourself," said Lucien.

Ninety-three years inside a walnut frame with blackened silver backing had apparently entitled Lucien to speak like a duke.

"You wrote two words."

"Effective words."

"Get out. Groundbreaking."

"The woman has not approached me after sunset in six weeks."

"She checks my tag to see if I'm machine washable."

Agatha rattled inside her cabinet.

The pillow knew she was laughing.

Claire's footsteps retreated down the hall.

Above the couch hung a framed print that said HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS.

That seemed excessive.

***

Claire had purchased the pillow for four dollars at an estate sale outside Dayton.

The estate itself deserved respect. The farmhouse had stood for ninety years, its porch sagged toward a dead orchard, and an upstairs bedroom remained locked from the inside despite the absence of any known occupant. Three unrelated shoppers also reported a woman humming beneath the floorboards.

Claire bought Lucien there for eighty dollars. Agatha cost sixty-five. The music box from the dead child's room reached one hundred and twenty after a bidding war with a woman who claimed she could smell sorrow.

The pillow, meanwhile, had been beneath a folding table beside a plastic Christmas wreath.

Its front was covered in reversible sequins, silver in one direction and rose gold in the other. Curly script across the middle offered the living three pieces of advice.

LIVE

LAUGH

LOVE

The humiliation remained fresh.

Claire almost left it behind.

"Oh, that's cute."

Those words had condemned it. Apparently nothing with decorative piping could inspire terror.

Something woke inside the jolting stuffing between the farmhouse and Claire's Subaru, with no memory of its name or death.

Memory returned only as pressure and darkness, a weight across a face it no longer had. Behind that pressure, the back of its skull knocked against something hard. There had been a word in him then, urgent enough to hurt, and nowhere for it to go.

After that came Claire's living room, where the afterlife had assigned him upholstery duty.

Three months passed from the same square of couch. Agatha turned her head completely around twice. Lucien showed Claire the reflection of a dead man standing behind her. The music box played four bars of "Clair de Lune" every morning at 3:17 despite a spring that had rusted solid sometime during the Carter administration.

Only the pillow failed to impress. It fell off the couch once, and Claire blamed the cat.

***

Thursday evening, the pillow recognized ceremony by its inconveniences. Six candles warmed one side of its cover while folding-chair legs rasped across the floor. A skull-labeled bottle of red wine stood beside Agatha, enthroned on the coffee table.

"No."

Agatha's glass eyes caught the candlelight.

"Oh, yes."

Claire straightened the doll's lace collar.

The pillow tried to disturb its sequins. Nothing moved.

"You little painted bitch."

"You mustn't take it personally."

"I'm on the couch."

"You are always on the couch."

The doorbell rang.

Equipment cases thumped onto the floor as six members of the Greater Montgomery County Paranormal Research Society entered with infrared cameras, digital thermometers, EMF meters, two pizzas, and enough batteries to survive a modest collapse of civilization.

Claire poured wine. "This is Agatha."

A bearded man crouched beside the coffee table. "I'm already getting a weird feeling."

The pillow nearly ruptured a seam. He had been in the room nine seconds.

"How long have you had her?" asked a woman in purple glasses.

"About three months. Same estate sale where I got the mirror."

Everyone looked toward Lucien, whose surface darkened until Purple Glasses recoiled. "Oh. Nope."

"Right?"

One sequin flipped on the couch. Nobody noticed.

The bearded man surveyed the collection. "So what got you into all this?"

For the first time that evening, Claire did not smile.

"My sister died two years ago."

A pizza box creaked shut.

Claire rubbed one thumb against her wineglass.

"I don't think she's trapped in a doll or anything. I just want one of these stupid things to be real."

The pillow considered this.

Agatha was, objectively, a stupid thing.

The bearded man nodded. "That isn't stupid."

"Actually," Claire said, "the pillow came from the estate sale too."

Six heads turned toward the couch; every fiber in the pillow tightened around the presence buried inside.

"The sequin one?" the bearded man asked.

"Yeah."

Someone near the pizza snorted. "Imagine getting murdered by a Live Laugh Love pillow."

Laughter rolled through the room, Claire included.

Nothing inside the pillow moved.

The music box chose that moment to begin. Every face turned away before the pillow could recover.

Four notes emerged, paused, and returned.

The bearded man raised his meter. "I've got a spike."

"Of course you do," whispered the pillow.

His head jerked around.

"What?"

The zipper flexed.

"Diiiiie."

"Did anybody hear that?"

Claire lifted one finger for quiet. The music box stopped by itself. In its place came the heating vent's rattle near the ceiling and tires whispering across wet pavement outside.

The pillow tried again.

"Diiiiie."

Purple Glasses looked toward the kitchen. "That sounded like a voice."

The bearded man raised a recorder.

"Can you tell us your name?"

The pillow hesitated. Not knowing its own name had been a persistent source of irritation.

"Deaaaaath."

The man tilted his head. "Beth?"

The pillow stopped.

"Is there a Beth connected to the house?" Claire asked.

Purple Glasses shook her head.

Somewhere beneath the batting, another small piece of dignity expired.

"Beth," Agatha whispered.

"Shut up."

"Beth the pillow."

Claire approached the couch. "Wait. Maybe it came from over here."

She knelt until her face hovered less than a foot away.

The sequins trembled.

A row flipped, followed by another. Silver disappeared beneath spreading rose gold while crooked letters emerged.

D

I

The pillow pushed harder.

E.

DIE.

Perfect.

Claire's mouth opened. The bearded man whispered, "No way."

For one radiant second, the pillow understood what saints must feel when the heavens open.

Claire brushed her palm across the sequins.

LIVE LAUGH LOVE returned.

"Aren't these supposed to do that?"

The bearded man tested them with two fingers.

"Yeah."

DIE disappeared beneath his hand.

"Oh."

Within thirty seconds, somebody asked about the basement. Death itself had lost the room.

Agatha waited until everyone had moved on.

"Beth."

***

By Saturday, humiliation had acquired a lump.

Near the pillow's center, the stuffing had compressed around a hard knot roughly the size of a walnut.

Claire's fingers found it Saturday morning.

"Huh."

Her fingers closed around the lump.

Yellowed wallpaper snapped into view. A brass bedframe caught the back of his skull with a hard metallic knock. Rose-gold sequins blurred inches from his face.

The room vanished when Claire squeezed again.

Someone else's fingers cinched into the pillow's edge while the back of his skull struck brass again.

"Stop."

The word escaped so softly that Claire missed it.

She pressed the knot with her thumb. The memory shattered.

"Oh, come on."

Two punches landed in the center of the pillow.

Agatha watched from behind glass.

"If you say anything, I swear to God."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

Claire tucked him under one arm.

The washing-machine lid clapped open above him.

"No. No, no, no."

She found the tag.

SPOT CLEAN ONLY.

Her sigh bordered on disappointment.

The pillow nearly wept. There were indignities, and there were spin cycles.

Back on the couch, Lucien's glass shimmered. "A narrow escape."

"You shut your filthy Victorian mouth."

"I have no mouth."

"Lucky you."

That night, the pillow devised a plan.

Ambition had produced Beth, so this one would be restrained. He would cross the living room somehow, reach Claire's bedroom at the far end of the hall, climb onto the bed, settle beside her face, and whisper something so intimate and inexplicable that she would reconsider sleep as a concept.

Lucien heard the proposal. "You cannot move."

"I fell off the couch."

"The cat pushed you."

"That has never been proven."

"The cat was sitting on you."

"Circumstantial."

Agatha angled her face toward him. "What will you whisper?"

The pillow had considered several possibilities.

"Your mother knows."

Lucien's surface clouded.

"Her mother is alive."

"Exactly."

"That doesn't mean anything."

"It doesn't have to."

At 2:11 a.m., Claire's bedroom door stood open at the far end of the hall.

Movement required nearly thirty minutes of concentrated spite, during which he advanced one miserable inch at a time toward the edge of the couch. At 2:47, one corner finally hung over empty space.

Gravity handled the rest with a soft whump that left him face down on the carpet.

"No."

Porcelain laughter rattled across the room.

"Not one word."

By 3:06, several heroic attempts had produced a slight rotation and no meaningful forward progress, a result the pillow would later classify as tactical rather than humiliating.

Soft paws crossed the floorboards, each step traveling through the carpet into the pillow.

"Don't."

Marmalade sniffed him.

"Don't you dare."

Two paws pressed into the center.

The knot answered. Brass rang against his skull. Sequins sealed off the room while a voice breathed one word beside his ear.

Walter.

"Lucien, do something."

"I am a mirror."

"Agatha."

"This is the best night I've had since 1932."

Marmalade circled once.

"No."

Twenty pounds of orange domestic shorthair settled directly onto the knot.

The memory came whole.

Walter lay on the bed with a forearm forcing the ridiculous pillow across his mouth, his heels striking the mattress while his head remained wedged against the brass frame. LIVE LAUGH LOVE glittered inches from his eyes.

The worst part, Walter thought now, was that somebody really had murdered him with it.

Marmalade purred. Walter screamed without sound, and the music box offered four delicate notes.

Morning found the cat asleep in exactly the same position.

When Marmalade finally left, Walter waited until soft pawfalls faded down the hall.

"My name is Walter."

Agatha turned her painted face toward him. "Beth suited you better."

One corner of Walter's cover twitched. "I hate you."

"I know."

Lucien's glass held the pale room without distortion. "Walter."

Walter faced the mirror. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Don't make this strange."

"An impossible task in your case."

***

Sunday night, Claire came down the hall in an old T-shirt with an empty glass in one hand. She stopped beside the framed photograph near the lamp, her thumb resting against its edge, and looked from Agatha to Lucien to Walter.

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

For an instant, the old pressure returned across the mouth he'd lost. Brass at the back of his skull. A word trapped behind cloth and teeth, urgent enough to become pain.

Walter had spent three months preparing for moments when the living finally addressed the dead. He had threats, insinuations, and one excellent line about her mother. None of them belonged here.

He tried to turn one sequin for her.

Nothing.

Claire stayed another few seconds before carrying the glass into the kitchen. Walter still did not know what he would have made the sequin say.

That bothered him more than failure usually did.

***

By Monday, Walter had abandoned grandeur. Spectral messages and journeys down the hall could go to hell. He wanted a scream.

The front door opened to the crackle of grocery bags against a rain-wet coat. Cupboard doors knocked in the kitchen. When Claire returned with wine, the overhead light never came on.

From inches above the couch arm, the lamp sent a thin electrical hum into Walter's fabric.

Claire's weight tipped the cushion toward her. The television announced itself first as a low vibration through the couch frame.

An investigator on-screen entered an abandoned hospital. A woman screamed, and Walter's sequins twitched; another followed when a shadow crossed a doorway.

"Amateur," said Lucien.

Walter ignored him.

The television flickered across Claire's face as somebody fled down a hospital corridor. After a moment, her attention slipped toward the framed photograph beside the lamp.

Two women stood together beneath a beach umbrella. Whoever held the camera had caught them mid-laugh.

Claire looked back at the television.

"I know," she murmured.

Walter did not know whether she was speaking to the woman in the photograph or herself.

With another dip of the cushion beneath her, Claire's elbow settled directly over the knot.

The old pressure returned.

Brass touched the back of Walter's skull.

For a moment he was in the farmhouse again, the pillow across his mouth, somebody breathing hard above him. The memory came sharper now: his own heels striking the mattress, the forearm above him, the absurd instruction glittering inches from his eyes. Whatever he had tried to say never reached the room.

Strategy had failed him, spectacle had humiliated him, and dignity had produced nothing at all.

One zipper tooth slipped open as Claire reached for her wine.

"Boo."

Claire screamed.

Wine struck the coffee table. The remote hit the rug. Marmalade launched himself down the hallway as Claire stumbled away from the couch.

"Jesus Christ!"

Agatha did not click. Lucien did not cloud. Even the music box seemed to reconsider its timing.

The refrigerator compressor cut off in the kitchen. Rain tapped against the window.

Claire pressed one hand against her chest.

"What the hell?"

For once, Agatha had nothing to say.

Lucien's glass remained perfectly clear, and one uncertain note sounded inside the music box.

Claire stared at the pillow.

She did not touch him or smile. The remote stayed on the rug as she crossed the room and lowered herself into the chair opposite the couch.

Her hand lifted from the armrest and stopped halfway toward him.

"Can you do that again?"

The overhead light stayed off. Claire's eyes moved once to the photograph, then back to Walter; the hand between them did not drop.

Agatha recovered first.

"That was hardly dignified."

Walter offered no response.

"You said boo," Lucien said.

Walter remained still.

"Your mother knows" waited in him, polished by three months of failure. He could put it beside her ear now and get the second scream.

Claire waited.

Instead, three sequins flipped, and LIVE LAUGH LOVE changed only slightly.

HA.

Claire's hand moved an inch closer; Walter rested beneath the word.

He had done it.