Attic Célibataire

They say the wife was mad. She screamed and babbled and tore her own eyes out. She died with a curse on her lips. They say her ghost is still here, a rail thin phantom with fingers like knives and bones twisted in a way that mirrors her disquiet of mind. She creeps through dreams at night and creeps through the walls and in both places leaves little strips of paper printed with sinister poetry. They say she is many wives, a multitude of bones abandoned in steamer trunks, and they wear the white shrouds of old wedding gowns now stained and torn and riddled with spiders. They say even now she watches from the attic.
He goes to the attic, pulls down the ladder and opens the scuttle hole. Cold darkness leaks down. Nothing whispers. He gives the dark a good hard glare and says, Try me, lady.

He says his wife is sane. His wife speaks in even silky tones, reads the news, invests well. She’s tall but not too tall, with a good figure and a good pedigree. She wears her blond hair long and curled, keeps a diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist, and has an MBA even though she doesn’t need to work. She wriggles her ass, cooks a mean spaghetti carbonara, and drinks wine on occasion. He’s largely convinced he loves her, which is why he bought her this big old house at considerable expense after an ugly bidding war that surely caused some family drama.
The day they move in, she stands just inside the front door and says, I love it, honey. It already feels like home.

The only weird thing about his wife, he says, is she’s into history. There are books upon books of history stacked in the library, the den, our bedroom. Piles of antiques. Literal piles. Old books heaped together in little monoliths over the floor and across the baseboards, too old to be stored in such a haphazard way. Their leather covers come apart when he stumbles over them. Their brittle yellow pages leak little flakes of paper with a few scribbled letters visible. ve, ath, el.
His wife says she loves the house because of its history. Look at this wainscotting, these tin ceilings. The craftsmanship! The day they move in she glides down the hallways and touches everything, the wallpaper, the oak chair rails, the French doors, the bay window.
He thinks the house is a big old crazy beast. One of those awful Victorians. He’s comforted only by the fact the neighborhood is prestigious. Doctors and lawyers and architects built this block over a hundred years ago, so the houses are all big old beasts, all gables and steep pitched roofs and towers and turrets. From the bay window in the living room he examines the block, all those crazy witch houses shrouded in lilac bushes and old-growth trees. Houses menace every side of the street under a sky as white as shrouds.
He thinks: he’d have preferred a luxury home on Sterling Ridge. Something sleek and marble with a jacuzzi in every bedroom and a golf range in the back lawn.
For a moment, he can’t remember how he got here.
Then his wife swings open the French doors behind him. I’m so happy. Have you seen what’s in the attic?
He tells her no. He thinks of the cold dark up there, the way it smells old and foul. Spiders whisper against the floorboards.

His brother calls to ask if he’s settled into that creepy old castle you bought.
Night is on its way, and the clouds outside the window are blood red and bruise purple. When his brother calls he’s in the oak-paneled den among his trophies and awards (football from his younger days, his real estate certifications, his philanthropy awards in crystal and burnished wood plaques, so many he’s forgotten what they were for). Here he can almost convince himself he belongs.
His wife is in the kitchen to work on dinner. The smell of carbonara wafts in.
All those ghosts driven you crazy yet? His brother asks.
He sips his bourbon as his brother goes into it. The shit he’s heard about the house. The original builder, a doctor, had this wife who went mad, had to be locked up in the attic and stuffed in a steamer trunk tied up in a torn wedding gown. After she died, they said her ghost haunted the house and took people along with her on the crazy train. His brother said people moved in and their spouses changed, went mad, screamed and tore their eyes out.
At a certain point he’s convinced his brother is drunk or high. His brother talks about the bones they found in the attic. Not healthy bones. These things were curved, curled into spirals like some obscene osteoporosis, like an unwholesome artist had stretched and sculpted them into monsters.
He sips his bourbon and cold sweat tickles his neck. He feels the burn of his ulcer flare up. Ghost stories sell houses, he tells himself, but this isn’t a ghost story. It’s something else.
He interrupts his brother, just when he’s gotten to a part where they found bones in the foundation like gruesome ammonites. Why the hell didn’t you tell me all this before?
His brother chuckles. Uncle Jeffrey told me to keep my mouth shut. He thought if he wouldn’t win the bid, at least he could make you shell out for it.
He grinds his teeth and tells his brother to go fuck himself.
That’s when he hears rustling upstairs. In the attic.

He’s had a bit too much bourbon at this point and his brother’s stories have burrowed under his skin, so he heads to the attic to investigate that rustling.
He thinks he might find his wife up there.
He thinks he might see his wife’s long blond hair gone wild and greasy, her nails brittle and yellow, her white cardigan torn and her tennis bracelet shiny like knives. He passes the kitchen and finds a single skillet simmered on low and her half-sipped wine glass abandoned on the counter. I called her name no one answered. He tells himself, She must have gone up to the attic to grab something for dinner.
Beneath the scuttle hole, the rustling noise is loud, too loud to be squirrels or mice. Before he moved in he paid good money to get this place inspected, cleared out, and he was assured that not a single termite or rodent or spider remained. The noise in the attic sounds spider-like but heavy. He pulls down the ladder and opens the scuttle hole. Looks.
The dark is absolute. The attic windows should cast some manner of light onto the floor, but there’s nothing. The dark is as thick as ink. It reeks. Bourbon, body odor, something cloying that turns his stomach. If he reaches his hand into the attic he’s certain the darkness will come off on his fingertips like a sludge, a substance as thick as oil. Sweat drips down his temples and into the collar of his polo shirt. The breeze from the attic wafts down and it’s as cold as the dark of space and it catches the moisture on his neck, makes him shiver.
His wife says behind him, You know there was never any wife up there.

He runs, tries to reach the front door. The night beyond the windows is heavy and starless. He scrambles through the house and turns on every light as he goes. Halls, den, library. The place is so big, he’s lost the door. In the kitchen the carbonara is burnt, and dust fills the wine glass, murky and swampish. Sweat stings his eyes. He struggles to keep his vision clear and stumbles over a pile of books on the floor.
The books have multiplied, bred to give birth to more strange tomes, ratty black and crimson covers nameless with their pages uneven and brittle between like moldy teeth. There’s barely anywhere to walk or move for all the books. He grabs one, examines its pages to try to determine where so many books may have come from.
He reads. Paragraphs crammed with the content of assessor’s office forms. Base Year Value Transfers, Homestead Declarations, Preliminary Change in Ownership Statements. Death of Real Property Owner.
And names. Pages and pages of names listed, one after the other. No spouses. Single people. Rows and rows of them, past owners of this house and their titles, esquire and junior and doctor, and the dates they lived here. He scans the dates and his gorge rises. None of them lasted more than a month here. Weeks at times. Days.
He can’t remember when it was they moved in. His fingers lock up and he can’t put the book down. In the margins, in light handwriting, someone has scribbled over and over a single word. Célibataire.

He remembers his wedding. The little vineyard by the sea. His wife wore a gauzy cream slip of gown. She held a bouquet of Calla Lilies, as long and tall and white as her. Uncle Jeffrey was already tipsy and passed around a flask of single malt to the other uncles in the back. By the time the reception was over, Uncle Jeffrey had wrecked his BMW and Granpa Raynard abandoned him at the hospital. A storm threatened in the distance and kicked the waves up in eager foam over the rocks.
He remembers his wife: her long blond hair caught the wind and fluttered and wrapped around her like rich spider silk. The bones of her cheeks swirled and coiled like snakes lived underneath and she smiled sweetly, her mouth full of knives.
Sweat covers his body, and he drops the book, stumbles down to the den where he’s left his phone. He calls his brother. His hand shakes almost too much to keep the phone clasped to his ear.
He hears his brother’s distant voice. That was my wedding. Little vineyard by the sea. Uncle Jeffery tried to sue me for losses, but he settled out of court.
His chest tightens as he thinks of his wife’s lips, hot and moist against his own.
His brother says, has the consummate bachelor finally met someone?
He throws down the phone and hyperventilates. The kick of oxygen to his old arteries makes his head spin and tiny knives spear his chest. He’s conscious of the fact that he’s about to pass out. He stumbles into the kitchen for water, something, anything.
Crooked shadows fill the kitchen. They stare and whisper. A black plume of smoke rises from the carbonara on the stove. Spiders crawl in the wineglass. The dark rushes in from all sides, and in the last seconds curled bone fingers reach out. They grab him.

They’ve taken him some place dark and cold. He’s sure it’s the attic.
In the cut of moonlight across the floor he can make them out. The ghosts. Broad shouldered and blind, wrapped in the remains of old tuxedos. Moth-eaten bow ties and desiccated boutonnieres. Not a wedding gown among them. Their limbs are twisted, their bones warped in coils and spirals. They shuffle around him a in crooked gait. Their heads crack open, and massive spiders clamber out. As the ghosts encircle him he smells bourbon and blood and hears whispers in low masculine tones.
They tell him it was the wife who was mad. She screamed and tore her hair and eyes out with fingers like knives. They say she sucked the marrow out of their bones with such force she reshaped them, her lips glossy with their own heart’s grease. They say she wrote them love poetry in the form of Preliminary Change in Ownership Statements, and her madness creeps through the walls of the house like long spiders and trails strands of strange silk.
They say it’s her madness. Hers. Hers.
They repeat it over and over until he screams and tears out his own eyes.

***

Dixon March is a reader and writer of weird fiction. At no point has she hosted a midnight radio talk show and/or intercepted dark messages from the stars. There are rumors she operates out of Omaha, Nebraska, US. Her stories have appeared in Nightscript vol VIII, Dose of Dread, Eerie River Publishing's Folk Horror Anthology, and Luna Station Quarterly.