Dog Days - (Episode 3 0f 4) - "Keeping Company"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is Dog Days, Episode 3, Keeping Company.

0:28 This is the part I have been trying to get to, and trying not to get to, since I started talking to you. You may already know what I'm going to say. I think you've known for a while. You're kinder than I was, you let yourself understand things faster. I'm going to tell it the way it happened anyway, in the order I lived it, because if I skip ahead to the end, you'll think I always knew, and the whole point, the whole horror of it, is that I didn't. Or I did, and I unknew it, Every hour, on purpose, with great care. That takes work. You have no idea how much work it takes to keep from knowing a thing that's in the same room as you. The water was gone. I need you to hold that, because it's the engine of everything else. There was no water in

1:23 the building and none coming, and no one to bring it. And the human body in that heat needs more than you'd believe. I found what I could. There's water in the tank behind a toilet. Did you know that? Clean enough if you're past caring, and there was a little in the pipes if you opened them at the lowest point in the apartment and let the building bleed. I drank things I won't describe, and what I found that was cleanest, that didn't smell, I poured into a glass and I set it by Edith's chair, because she needed it more than I did. She was older, She was frail.

2:04 I told you at the start, I gave her the better share. I went on giving it. The glass was always full. I'd come back to it and it would be full to the line I'd poured. The surface gone still and dusty, the way standing water goes, and I'd think, she hasn't had any, she must not be thirsty, she's resting.

2:28 And I'd not let myself think the next thought, the obvious one, The one a child would think that a thirsty person in a drought drinks the water you put beside them. And a person who doesn't isn't resting. I'd tip it out and pour it fresh. Clean water, in that famine of water, poured out on the floor day after day because the woman beside it would not drink it.

2:58 I have done some things in my life I'm ashamed of. That glass is near the top of the list. and I didn't even know I was doing it. There was a smell. It came up slow, the way the heat came up slow, so that each hour was only a little worse than the hour before, and you could tell yourself it had always been like this. I blamed the chute.

3:22 The garbage chute ran down through the building, and nobody'd taken the garbage out in weeks, a whole tower's worth of it rotting in the shaft, and in that heat... the whole city smelled like something gone over. You'd open a window for air, and the air was worse than the room. So when the smell got into the apartment, I said, the chute. I said, the meat in the freezer, since the power died, of course everyone's freezer in the building turning at once. I said every true thing I could find. so I wouldn't have to say the true thing that was sitting six feet from me in a chair by the window with a blanket I'd tucked up to its chin. And there were flies. I'd left a window open. It was summer. There are always flies in summer,

4:13 I told myself. You leave a window open in the heat, and they come in. It means nothing. It's the season. I didn't ask what they'd come in for. I didn't follow them with my eyes to see where in the room they wanted to be. I waved them off her face when they landed there. I did do that. I kept them off her. I want that counted too, in whatever it is you're keeping on me. And I told her, they're terrible this year, aren't they? And I waited, and she didn't say anything. And I decided that meant she agreed.

4:48 That was how I talk to her now. I'd ask, and wait, and answer for her, and the answering got easier every day. Are you warm enough? And I'd wait, and decide she was. Should I read to you? Wait. No. You're tired. I can tell. Do you think the man got home all right, and the silence would sit there? And I'd fill it. I think he did. I think somebody let him in. and her not answering became the most agreeable conversation I'd ever had with anyone. Because she never once disagreed, never told me I was wrong, never said the cruel, obvious thing. And a person starved of company will take a conversation where they say both parts.

5:34 They will take it gladly. I looked forward to it. God forgive me. Those talks by the window were the only thing I looked forward to. A woman, and the shape in the chair, and the flies, having the kindest conversation of my whole life. Sometimes I'd take her hand to make a point, the way you do, and her hand was cool. I keep coming back to that, and I'm going to come back to it once more, and then I'll leave it alone. She ran cool. I'd known her cool hands for years. So when they were cool, I felt nothing. But the old familiar thing, there's Edith, cool as ever. And once I'm going to say this, and then we'll move on. Once I pressed her hand to my own cheek, because the cool of it was the only relief in that whole boiling world. I held

6:33 her hand against my face for the cool of it, and I thanked her, and I told her she was good to me, and I meant it. And I have to stop now for a moment. At night, when there was nothing else to do, I'd stand at the window, nine floors up, and the city, you have to understand what the city was. Black, not dark, black, not one light in any window in any direction, not a street lamp, not a car, not the red crawl of an aircraft, nothing.

7:11 A whole city poured full of ink, and above it the sky a sick brown-purple, that never went all the way down to night because the heat held the day's colour like a coal. I would stand at that window and look out at a world with not one living light in it and understand, in the only clear minutes I had, exactly how alone I was. And then I'd turn around, and there in the chair was a shape by the window, my shape, my person, the one who needed me, the one I'd stayed for, and the relief of it the relief of turning from that dead black window and finding I was not the last living thing.

7:54 After all, I cannot describe it to you, and I'm not sure I want you to understand it, because if you understood it you might understand what I did, and I'd rather you didn't. I'd rather you thought I was only mad. Mad is cleaner. Mad isn't a choice. It nearly came apart once, the knowing nearly got through. It was an afternoon, the light low and orange and coming in flat across the room, and it fell on her, on the chair, full on it, the way the afternoon light hadn't in days, because I'd taken to keeping the curtains drawn. I'd told myself it was to keep the heat out, but I think now I'd been keeping the light off her, the honest light that shows you things.

8:44 And that day, the curtain had slipped, and the sun came in and lit her up, and I saw. I want to be careful here, because I don't break the rule I've kept this whole time, which is that I don't say the things that only work if you can see them. I won't describe what the light showed me. I'll only tell you that for about the length of one breath I saw the chair by the window, the way you, a stranger, would have seen it if you'd walked in off the street. I saw it with your eyes, and my legs went, and I sat down hard on the floor, and a sound came out of me that I didn't make on purpose, and the room tilted, and for that one breath I knew, completely, the way you know a stove is hot once you've touched it, and

9:31 then I closed it. I want you to hear how deliberate it was, because this is the thing I'm confessing, more than the glass, more than the flies, I did not faint, I did not lose my mind. I made a decision. I got up off the floor and I crossed the room and I pulled the curtain shut, hard, all the way. And I shut the honest light out of that apartment for good and I said out loud to the room. to her, to myself, don't you dare, don't you dare leave me up here alone. And I tucked the blanket back the way I liked it, and I sat down by the chair, and I started telling her about a Christmas I remembered. And I asked her if she remembered it too, and I waited, and she agreed that she did. I chose her, knowing, for one

10:25 breath I knew, and I chose her anyway. Because the alternative was that black window and the empty city and being the last light in the world, and I was not strong enough to be the last light in the world. I'd rather be a madwoman with a friend than a sane woman with no one. I made that trade with my eyes open. Remember that, when you decide what I am.

10:51 I don't know how many more days I'd have lasted, not many. You can't drink what I was drinking and live long, and I was thin as a rumour by then, and I was halfway into the chair with her more often than I was out of it. We might have just stayed there, the two of us, by the window, until there was one shape in the chair instead of two, and no one left to pour the water out. That's how it should have ended. That's the ending I'd earned.

11:23 But that night the wind changed. I felt it before I understood it. A difference in the dark. A pressure. A smell that wasn't rot and wasn't the shoot. A green smell. An electric smell. The smell of the underside of something enormous moving in off the water. I went to the window. Far out over the black city. Low on the horizons. The sky did something it hadn't done in weeks. It flickered. A long way off, no sound yet, just a pulse of light deep in the cloud. There and gone, there and gone, lighting the belly of the dome from inside. The heat was about to break. I stood at that window with the wind starting to move the curtain. I'd shut so carefully. and I felt the first cool breath of it on my face, the first

12:19 cool thing in that whole dead summer that wasn't a dead woman's hand. And I should have wept with relief. I was afraid. I'd never been so afraid in all of it as I was right then, feeling the heat about to let go. Because some animal part of me already understood what the cool was going to do. It was going to come into that apartment, and it was going to clear the air, and it was going to open the curtains, whether I wanted them open or not.

12:49 And then there'd be the light, and in the light, I would not be able to keep from knowing.