Saturday's Storyteller: "Even her smile creaked."

by Belinda Roddie

Even her smile creaked. Everything about her creaked. It was uncanny because I was certain she wasn't any older than sixty. I would expect women or men in their seventies onward to start getting rusty around their hinges or squeaky in their joints. But she in particular had aged too fast. When she sat down on the couch, everything squealed, like the brakes of a car wearing down very quickly on a bumpy country road.

This was my wife's aunt Zoley, the woman we were meant to look after while my inlaws were away on their annual, stuffy vacation to the east coast. Where we were, it hadn't rained adequately in a good seven years. My once everyday routine of taking a five minute shower was now every other day. I substituted cider and whiskey for water a lot. My wife insisted on bringing her aunt fresh avocados, even though they were twice the cost of what they used to be since we had met. We would split the things open and scoop their innards out into bowls, bringing the servings over with sides of garlic salt and cayenne pepper. Zoley would eat two at a time, the green slop occasionally greasing the corners of her lips as she swallowed while barely chewing.

"Sometimes," she would say, "it's nice to just sit down and endure the heat with you two. How long has it been since you married?"

Her voice was the only thing about her that hadn't obtained a whine or a groan. In fact, it was almost bronzed - polished, refined, and very bold. I set down the stein of cider I was drinking and folded one leg across the other.

"Five years now, Auntie," my wife cooed, reaching over to pat the woman's leg. I half-expected it to whistle like an old iron gate.

"How lovely," Zoley mumbled with a fresh mouthful of avocado. "Perhaps you can get your husband to clean up the attic for me at some point. I just can't get up any stairs easily these days. You understand. Bad knees."

Bad knees, indeed. I wouldn't have been surprised if an autopsy later on proved that they had become fully ossified. I rose from my chair wearily, ready to take on the task.

"Oh, not now, my dear!" Zoley cried, waving a hand at me that crackled like popcorn. "Later tonight, when I'm ready for bed. You see, there are a few photo albums up there of me and my late husband. Such a dear, really, but he so urgently wanted to tuck them away. And in the dirtiest, eeriest part of the house, no less."

"I guess," I said, breaking my silence for the first time in about a half hour, "it's appropriate, given the 'spooky attic' cliché."

My aunt-in-law's laugh, unlike her voice, was wispy and almost non-existent. She smiled, and the creaking started again. "I forgot," she said to my wife, her eyes focused more on the cushions against her niece's elbow rather than on her niece herself. "Your husband is the writing type."

"Editing, actually," my wife replied with a small, bearable grin. "You get used to it after a while."

Another strained twenty minutes later, I was clearing Zoley's bowls and dumping them into the steel sink, where I would dab at them with a damp, soaped up cloth in order to spare an aggressive flow from the faucet. Everything in the house felt so dry, almost stale. It was almost absorbing the drought more than the earth outside was. I returned to the living room to find Zoley still sitting on the couch. Her hands were folded in her lap like crinkled paper against crinkled paper. She appeared so much older than her actual age that I was almost tempted to ask her what it was like to live through the Civil War. But I held my tongue.

"Remember, Joel," she told me as my wife disappeared into the bathroom, "when you clean the attic, bring a flashlight, and maybe something to clear away the cobwebs. I would imagine it looks like an abandoned cave there by now. Never liked to go into the attic, you see. Too many shadows, and everything creaks. Even the walls seem to breathe on their own."

If the attic creaked as much as Aunt Zoley did, I thought to myself, I'd be more than surprised. I'd probably be a bit terrified, too. Still, it was either this or another game of Scrabble while feeding Zoley more mushed up avocado. I knew where my priorities lay.

***

Walking up the ladder-like stairs to the attic was vaguely reminiscent of the beginning of an Edgar Allan Poe short story. I may as well have called my flashlight a torch. It almost burned like one, as I pushed the door open and hoisted myself inside, just in time to be met by a blanket of cobwebs that clung to my cheeks and nearly made my hair and sideburns appear stark white and gray.

The attic really did creak, just as Zoley said it would. Interestingly, however, it was almost bare. There were no scraps of old furniture, no stacks of boxes upon boxes of forgotten antiques, or jewelry, or novelty items. No racks of moth-devoured clothes to scan through for leftover change or trinkets. Considering how Zoley had described it a few hours earlier, it really did feel like an abandoned cave. It was cold like one, too. That was startling, considering the desert-like traits of the world outside.

In fact, the only things in the attic at all were two very small chests. Toy chests, from the looks of it, painted red or blue with little animals above the keyholes. I found that they were not locked, the lids opening with a disconcerting ease, as if they were lighter than air. Lo and behold, the treasure was not toys, but the photo albums that Zoley had asked for.

I started piling the old, ratty booklets into a makeshift tower, attempting to keep the flashlight steady as I swiped a strand of cobweb away from my head. I had brought along a humble rolling pin to serve as my clearer, one knob broken off from it, which made it okay to use away from the kitchen. When I got to the second to last album in the second chest, however, something made me stop. I set the flashlight down so that its beam shot its way between my legs and illuminated the chalky yellow painting of a duck on the chest, practically making it glow. The rolling pin was propped against my extended right foot, the wood scraping against the rubber of my shoe.

The second to last album, wrapped in some kind of black leather-like binding, was the largest out of the entire stack. It almost felt like a book, and more apropos to my curiosity rather than my logical judgment, I cracked it open. The photos, initially, were fairly telling and predictable, with black and white smiles sketched onto the faces of Zoley and her now deceased husband. The captions, in bad penmanship, were misspelled disasters like, "Our honymoon," and, "Our anniversry." It was enough to make my proofreading side cringe.

They did seem happy, though. Even as they aged, they seemed happy. Zoley's husband, whose name was Marlowe, would smirk beneath a withdrawing hairline at the age of twenty-seven. He would be totally bald at thirty-two, bouncing my wife's sister on his lap. Zoley's hair looked thinner, too, come to think of it, at a younger age. As the photos became more colorful, I was becoming more and more aware of the color, ironically, fading from the couple's faces. What was happening? They were in their late thirties at this point in the album's timeline, and they looked like they were about ready to retire and move into a smaller estate.

It didn't end there. As I turned the page, I stopped myself from emitting a blood-curdling, very unmanly shriek. There was Zoley, all right, hair nearly gray at forty-two, with her husband, Marlowe - fifty years old, and nearly skeletal. His flesh looked half-melted, the jowl drooping so far it nearly touched the emaciated creases of his neck. You could see the red patches of his eye sockets, the gums receding painfully in his smile, exposing the fang-like qualities of his teeth. The next page over, he looked nearly mummified. The next, fossilized. I could hardly imagine what my wife must have thought while visiting him. Did he scare her? Did he even need a Halloween costume? What did he look like at fifty-three, or fifty-four, or fifty-five? He had been sixty-two when he died. He must have rivaled the looks of a centuries-old Tutankhamen, nestled in a wooden sarcophagus.

I set the album down slowly and did not dare look at the last one. I was trying to figure out what this meant for Zoley, and, to an extent, what this meant for my wife. If this family prematurely aged, then what would our photos look like when we had our first child, or first grandchild? Come to think of it, my wife did seem a little greener around the gills lately, but she was only twenty-seven. Maybe I hadn't noticed any gray hairs yet because she secretly dyed them. I knew how much she loathed my making comments about her appearance. Whom had I married? What had I married? And in the ravaged land of our water-parched state, would it get even worse?

"You don't have to worry about her, you know," a familiar voice resonated behind my ear, forcing me to spin around and knock both the flashlight and the rolling pin to the side.

It was Zoley, and she looked even older than she had a few hours ago. Her remaining hair was very, very white, though lacking luster, like snow coated with volcanic ash. Her wrinkled lips were pursed together, and the groaning of her body matched the squeaking of the walls and corners of the attic. It was then that I realized that she was nearly like the attic itself - hell, she almost matched the color of it, brownish gray in patches on her hands and cheeks. I opened my mouth to speak, shuddering as I thought I heard my jaw unhinge.

"Marlowe and I," she said, "are a little bit cursed. It comes from fear, you see. Fear of aging. Fear of dying. Marlowe missed his good looks. He was so fragile about them. Wanted those photos tucked away so no one could remember what he looked like. He was quite proud, you see. I, on the other hand, can handle looking like a prune at the age of fifty-nine."

"Fifty-nine," I echoed, my tongue seizing against my teeth. "That young?"

Zoley sighed and stretched her back. I could hear every spinal disk in her body pop like old bolts resettling in a dilapidated industrial machine.

"It's only been five years since his death," she intoned. "Sound familiar, yes? Five years since you married. You know, we thought it was the attic, initially, when we began to look like hags at middle age. Like it was haunted. But it's not that, is it? Fear...that's what drives us further to death. The drought. The dryness. Sucking the meat away from your bones, the nutrients from a stalk of corn. It fades far too quickly."

"Do you think my wife...?"

"Your wife?" Zoley let out another wheezing laugh. It fit the atmosphere of the cavern-like attic too well. "You have no need to worry about her. She's strong. Brave. A survivor. She'll look like a cherub until the day she dies. You, on the other hand...I'd worry about you."

My terror was palpable. I groped for the rolling pin, only to find a shriveled stump against my fingers. The flashlight was already beginning to flicker out, despite having a fresh battery. How could this place not be haunted? And now, as I touched the photo album, I could feel it crumble beneath my hand, which felt very tense and stiff by now.

"Joel," Zoley breathed, smiling so hard that it wouldn't stop whistling. "A cobweb."

She was pointing a gnarled finger at my hair, and when I moved to brush the invading threads away, they wouldn't budge. Instantly, I knew they weren't cobwebs at all, but long, graying hairs. And instantly, as I screamed, I could feel my limbs contort in the first stages of creaking, frightening decay.

This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.