The January Second Selected Writer is Paul Dale Anderson

Please feel free to email Paul at: pda@pauldaleanderson.com

AFTER THE FALL
by Paul Dale Anderson

It’s not easy growing old. Your bones begin to slowly separate and grow apart as you age. When your hip joints and knee joints and ankle joints no longer align, every nerve in your body screams bloody-murder each time you move your joints. If you’ve seen bow-legged old people trying to walk, you know what it’s like. Each step is a challenge. Each step is torture.

Bones become brittle. The older you get, the greater the leeching of calcium from the human body. Calcium is the main building block of bone. Falls are especially dangerous for older people. It’s harder than hell to get back up once you fall, and when bones break they don’t mend easily. Be careful you don’t fall. You may never get up again. You’ve been warned. Whatever you do, don’t fall.

“Oh, shit! I’ve really done it now,” you tell yourself the moment you lose your balance traversing the stairs. You feel two of the longer bones in your lower right leg splinter as your body tumbles—head over heels—down all thirteen hard-wood steps that connect your small kitchen with the dark basement. You land on the bare cement floor with your right leg bent at an impossible angle, your left knee wedged between buttocks and the last step, and your right hand hanging loosely from a wrist as limp as a Raggedy Ann  doll’s.

Excruciating pain doesn’t instantly overwhelm you. Instead, an icy numbness creeps slowly up from your ankles, spreads past your fractured hips, and nearly stops your heart. You feel nothing but fear. You’ve lived alone in this old two-story Victorian since your wife died six years ago. No one can hear your screams. No one will come to your aid.

You adamantly refused to admit you were growing old even when the face and body you viewed in the mirror looked nothing like the twenty-something-year-old’s body you remember. You went about your daily routine as if you hadn’t changed with time. You were a fool.

You lay there a long time. You don’t dare move a muscle. You can’t feel your feet. The sharp end of a broken bone protrudes through the ripped cloth of your right pants leg. Blood drips to the floor like water from a leaky bathroom faucet. Blip. Blip. Blip. The pool of blood grows larger. Blip. Blip. Blip. There’s no drain in the floor. Blip. Blip. Blip. There’s no place for the blood to go.

Your right side took the brunt of the fall. Your right arm is broken. Your right leg is splintered.

It hurts to move your left arm, but you discover the bones are thankfully intact. You know you need to crawl back upstairs and stop the bleeding with bandages. If you lie here much longer, you’ll lose consciousness from lack of blood. If you keep bleeding, you’ll eventually die.

Is death so bad? you wonder. Your wife died six years ago, and you miss her terribly. Her pain ended when cancer took her from you. Your pain began when Elsie was diagnosed, and it didn’t end when Elsie died.

At first, you denied Elsie’s cancer was real. Then you denied that the chemo wasn’t working. Even at the funeral, you denied Elsie was gone. You’ve been stuck in the denial phase of grieving for six years. You can’t imagine life without Elsie, so you imagine she is still alive.

You feel her everywhere, just like always. People used to say you two were joined at the hip. For nearly fifty years that had certainly been true.

You met Elsie four years after you graduated from college. She began as an intern at the newspaper where you worked as a junior copy editor, back in the days when newspapers were viable. You fell in love the moment you saw her. She said she didn’t know she loved you until she heard your melodic voice above the clatter of the AP teletype banging out wire stories. She singled out your voice from the usual cacophony of the busy newsroom, the ringing telephones, the clacking typewriters, the zipping pneumatic tubes that carried copy from editorial down to the composing room. She claimed she heard every word you said, and she fell in love with your voice and your words.

You used words to win her and words to keep her. You promised to love, obey, and cherish her. Until death do you part.

But death didn’t part you. Not really. You felt Elsie’s presence even after her cancer-riddled body was buried in the cold ground. Elsie remained a part of the house, your house. The reason you hadn’t moved was because Elsie was here. Maybe you could no longer see her. But you felt her and knew she was still here.

And now you think you hear her voice above the pain, just as she had once heard your voice above the din of the newsroom. “Get up, lazy bones,” her voice says. “Do you want to lie around all day? You have work to do. Get up. Get up now!”

You use what little upper-body strength you have to lift your chest off the basement floor. You manage to turn your broken body around to face the stairs. You reach out a trembling left hand to grab onto the wooden step two steps above your head and pull yourself up one entire stair-length, dragging your useless right leg behind you. Your left leg obediently bends at the knee and you use your left leg to advance to the next step. You lift, reach out, pull, move your left leg up, drag your right. You painfully inch your way up the cellar stairs using only the left side of your body. You have no idea how long it takes you. You’re so lightheaded when you get to the top of the stairs and look back at the long trail of blood, you feel you might pass out at any moment. You imagine your unconscious self sliding back down the bloodied stairs all the way to the bottom. You drag yourself into the kitchen and try to stand.

That was a bad mistake. Not only won’t your right leg support you, you don’t have enough upper-body strength left to heft your weight upright. You tumble onto the hard ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor, and you hear another bone crack as you reflexively attempt to stop your nose from connecting with the floor. This time it’s your left wrist that splinters. It would have been far better to break your nose than your wrist.

Now, even if you could reach up to the telephone fastened to the kitchen wall, you wouldn’t even be able to press buttons because both hands are completely useless.

Humans, unlike other animals, are seldom aware of what’s happening inside their bodies. Humans pay little attention to feeling hungry or tired, because humans have designated times and places to eat and sleep. We’ve created bedrooms and hotels to sleep in at night, and kitchens, dining rooms, and restaurants to eat breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. We drink water from kitchen faucets or refrigerated plastic bottles. We have no need to hunt, seek shelter, or look for rivers or ponds. We take for granted that all our needs will somehow be supplied, just as we take for granted our bones will always support us and our hearts will continue to beat. Maybe we’re not really so smart. Maybe we’ve forgotten that all animals—humans included—need to be as aware of what goes on inside the body as outside the body. Animals that focus on other things don’t survive.

Elsie tried to ignore the growing pain in her gut by consuming over-the-counter pain relievers as if they were candy. It wasn’t until the pain became so bad it doubled her up and kept her in bed during the day that she agreed to see a doctor. By then, of course, it was too late. The cancer had already metastasized into other organs and into her spinal column. Surgery couldn’t remove the cancer and chemo couldn’t cure her. The pain only grew worse.

Pain is a warning sign that humans, unlike other animals, are too busy with too many other things to take seriously. We ignore warnings all the time. We’ve been warned not to drink and drive, but we do. We’ve been warned not to exceed the speed limits, but we do. We’ve been warned not to smoke, but some still do. We’ve been warned not to have unprotected sex but, in the heat of the moment, we too often do.

We’ve all seen movies that warn us not to swim in the ocean or we’ll be devoured by sharks. We’ve all been warned not to go down into a dark basement alone or the boogeyman—or maybe even Freddy Krueger—will get us.

Be aware you have been warned. You ignore the warnings, you have to pay the price.

Where is Elsie when you need her?

“I’m here,” you hear her sweet voice say. Does her voice sound only in your mind? Are you hallucinating? Has pain and blood loss affected your sanity?

No. You have heard Elsie’s voice so many times before and felt her presence beside you that you know with certainty she has never left you and never will. She remains as much a part of this house as you. She has lived here with you since the day the two of you, newly married, closed on financing the house of your dreams fifty-five years ago. Her spirit is as much a part of this house as you are.

Your blood is now, and will forever be, a permanent part of this house. Human blood—your blood—stains all thirteen stairs and has soaked deep into tiny cracks that run like veins through basement cement. Elsie, too, is a permanent part of this house. She’s not a fixture but permanently a part of the structure itself. When the tears she shed, not from the physical pain she felt near the end but from the mental anguish of knowing she would be leaving you alone, fell to the floor, they fell less like tiny raindrops but more like thick drops of her life-blood. And the love the two of you shared for so many years remains throughout this house and will remain here forever. You feel it in the kitchen, upstairs in the bedroom, in the living room, in every single room and every corner of every room. This is not just a house, this is a home. Elsie and you made it a home.

You have no recollection of dying. Elsie takes your hand and stays with you until the pain goes away. Then she helps you to your feet and the two of you walk through your house together holding hands. Elsie looks as young as she did when you first saw her, and she says you look and sound as she always remembers you.

Your children are grown and have houses and children of their own. They sell the house in order to liquidate your estate. The couple who buys the house, however, always argue over little things like money and putting the cap back on the toothpaste and leaving the toilet seat up. You and Elsie grow tired of the constant bickering. But what can you do? You are merely spirits who have no way of interacting with the physical world.

It is the house itself that eventually drives the new owners away. It is the house that makes strange moans all night long to prevent the new owners from sleeping. It is the house itself that slams doors shut to lock people inside bathrooms or bedrooms or closets for hours or days. A succession of new owners come and go. No one wants to stay in the house for long. No one except you. And Elsie.

It is the house that earns the reputation of being haunted. A “For Sale” sign is permanently planted in the front yard.

Time means nothing to you or Elsie any more. Days pass. Months pass. Years. Decades. You are happy in this house, your home. Even when dust becomes an inch thick and faded paint peels from living room and bedroom walls, you barely notice. Rain begins to seep between worn shingles, between joists, to drip from second-floor ceilings into bedrooms and the upstairs bathroom. Standing water warps the hardwood floorboards, drips down onto the main floor to pool on the living room carpet. Mold spores multiply in the dark and invade the floors and the walls.

Just as you grew old and finally fell down, so has your house grown old. Any day now, anxious neighbors speculate, the house could collapse on its own. Better to tear it down before that happens. You hear a worker nail a “Condemned Property Warning” sign to the front door. Two days later, the wrecking crew arrives with bulldozers.

“Do something,” Elsie says.

“What can I do?” you ask. You feel totally helpless.

“Talk to them. Tell them to stop. This is our home. If they tear our home down, where will we go?”

You go out the door, literally pass through the closed door, and tell the men to stop, but they cannot hear you above the roar of the machines. Half the men are busy driving an end loader/backhoe and heavy dozers down ramps from the rear of two flat-beds while the other half approach the house with sledgehammers and axes and crowbars. One man leans a ladder against the side of the house and several others scramble up the rungs of the ladder carrying their wrecking tools.

“Please, listen!” you shout. No one hears.

But the house hears. The house knows. The house—home to your blood, sweat, and tears for more than half a century—lets out what sounds like a moan as the walls suddenly shift and slant. The ladder falls to the ground, taking the men with it. Two men, who made it safely to the roof before the ladder fell, heft pickaxes to begin tearing off shingles. But the roof itself suddenly expands and then buckles as if the house were alive and breathing, inhaling and exhaling. Both men lose their balance and fall from the roof. One man lands atop his own pickaxe and is impaled.

Demolition halts while an ambulance is called.

You silently watch as the injured men are carted away. But more men arrive. This time they bring with them two new machines. One is a small crane with a wrecking ball dangling from the boom. The other is a Hitachi Zaxis with a metal scoop at the end of the jointed boom. You watch with dread as the machines—two dozers, one end loader, one crane with a wrecking ball, and one demolition excavator—line up to attack the house from all sides. What chance does a house have against an army of machines?

This time it is not the house that shifts and buckles but it is the earth herself that quakes from the weight of all that advancing metal. As sewer pipes collapse, the earth shifts beneath the machines. The unstable crane with the dangling wrecking ball tumbles, and the heavy ball swings to the side and connects with a bulldozer. As the crane’s boom collapses, part of the boom falls atop the demolition excavator and crushes the cab and the man inside the cab. One dozer and one end loader remain intact. The bulldozer lowers its shovel and takes aim at the house. Metal tracks tear up the untended lawn as the dozer gains momentum.

The sinkhole that opens up and swallows the bulldozer looks as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon. It extends from one end of the front yard to the other. Where the dozer, its driver, and the tons of dirt that had previously existed disappeared is a mystery.

The man operating the backhoe and end loader abandons his machine and runs for his life.

City officials and a handful of civil engineers gather in the street to evaluate the damage after everyone has been evacuated from the property. Four men died and six more are seriously injured, and the house still stands.

“It’s too expensive,” the mayor finally says. “Better to just build a fence to keep people away and let the place collapse when it’s good and ready.” The engineers agree.

Elsie and you watch workmen construct an eight-foot tall wooden fence to wall off the entire property from the rest of the city. Now the house is surrounded not only by a six-foot wide bottomless trench, but also by an eight-foot high wall.

Written on the wall are these words: “Warning! Danger! Do Not Enter!”

Be aware: You have been warned.

Paul Dale Anderson is the author of Abandoned (Eldritch Press), Winds, Darkness, Light (2AM Publications), and the Instruments of Death series of digital crime-suspense novels from Crossroad Press. His short stories have appeared in The Horror Show, Deathrealm, Dark Regions, The Arkham Sampler, Weirdbook, and major anthologies.