Short Story: The Couch

Note: This story was originally published in The Macabre Museum.

Ed was no good at being alone. He’d had years of practice, of course, before Mary had come into the picture. They had hit it off almost immediately, started as friends first but he often thought that they could both tell, from the moment they first spoke to each other, exactly where it was heading. He loved her. Just like that, his days of being on his own were over and ever since, being alone had gotten a little more difficult.

She was one reason, at least. The other was much simpler: he got bored. Whenever he was left to his own devices for any period of time, he got so bored and hadn’t the slightest clue what to do with himself. Now she was gone for the weekend, a retreat with work friends he had never met and didn’t care to, while he was laid out on the sofa with a bag of chips lying flat on his stomach. It always looked like this.

Always the same.

He didn’t really know anybody. A few friends from work, but all of them casual, no one really that close. Ed was happy for Mary, though. There was no contempt for her tight social circle. She had always been better at making friends than he had.

But this couch.

It was the couch he was beginning to hate. His only friend when she was gone. The moment she was out the door, it swallowed him up and refused to let him go until she returned.

Mary had left him for a whole weekend this time. It was bad enough being left to his own devices for a night, but this? There was only so much TV a man could watch before it all bled together. Even now, it was mostly background noise. He’d tried cooking for himself, he’d even attempted writing again. Ed was always so sure he had that great novel in him until he actually sat down and opened up a blank document.

He supposed you needed experience to be a writer. And that’s not what this was. If anything, it was as if he had been separated out from experience itself and placed here in his own little terrarium. A controlled environment. If he opened the curtains to find a group of men and women in lab coats staring back at him, Ed would not have been surprised.

But he did not open the curtains, instead he changed the channel and tried to turn his focus back to the TV. It was a fear he’d had ever since childhood, leaving the curtains open at night. He never knew what it was exactly that he had expected to see out there, looking back in at him, but that was partially what scared him: the not knowing.

The TV wasn’t helping to quell his boredom either. Usually, nights like this when Mary was gone, it was a good chance to catch something he may have missed in theaters. But they had been pretty good at seeing everything they found even slightly interesting this past year. There was nothing, no film at least, that he hadn’t seen a hundred times and knew word for word.

But there were plenty of shows and plenty of channels. TV was better than the movies were these days, at least that was what everyone said. So there had to be something. Ed wasn’t sure if he believed it or not, but it was a good attitude to have. He wanted to embrace the notion that he could enjoy the evening, even if he was doing nothing but passing it with some show everyone at work always talked about but that he had never actually seen.

Maybe likening to their TV tastes would actually help him to fit in. It was Best Buy after all. People who came in to look at new televisions always talked about their shows, as if only certain TVs could actually pick up The Walking Dead or—more likely—Frasier reruns. He flipped through he thirty Spanish channels and the hundred Pay Per View channels until he arrived back at the legitimate options. From there, Ed started to narrow his choices. It was a process, one that Mary constantly teased him for, but it worked.

He decided. And in his deciding, he thought he’d make some popcorn as well. Make a whole evening of it. Why not? It wasn’t like he had anything better to do. So he rose from the couch and stepped into the kitchen.

The apartment was big, and he liked that. It would be great for parties if they had any mutual friends. But the kitchen was small, especially compared to the rest of it. It didn’t bother him much, they didn’t do much cooking and even when they did, they had the space to do it. Still, the fact that only one person could be operating in the kitchen at any given time had always gotten to him. He wasn’t quite sure why.

Ed checked the cupboards. There was a box of microwave popcorn and one of those pop-up buckets, which had always freaked him out a little. So he went with the tried-and-true bags. Movie Theatre Butter flavor, his favorite, even though it was a lie. Whatever they put in the microwave stuff, whatever chemical combination it was, it wasn’t the same chemical combination he was treated to at the theater. They could call it whatever they wanted, he’d eat it nonetheless, but he would have appreciated a little more truth in advertising.

He popped open the microwave door and set the timer for three minutes, ignoring the button marked “Popcorn” which always seemed to burn the stuff while only popping half the damn bag. With the microwave whirring and the slight tapping noise of the cooking bag, he turned back to the living room.

And froze.

There was a woman lying on his couch. That was his first thought and even that was unbelievable because the TV wasn’t up that loud (he had neighbors after all) and he would have heard the door open. He would have heard someone come in. That, and he’d been in the kitchen all of ten seconds. There was no way that this woman had time to come in here and lay herself out so neatly. So perfectly. Not that quietly and not in that amount of time.

His continued staring led him to a second revelation: this woman was dead.

At first he must have assumed she was asleep because she was lying so perfectly still with her eyes closed. Or maybe he hadn’t assumed anything because there was no way this was happening right now. This couldn’t be happening. A woman dying on his couch was unbelievable enough. With the right circumstances, that in itself could cause the mind to break. But a dead woman who had not been there all of ten seconds ago? Suddenly here, unmoving on his sofa—no. That couldn’t be happening.

A thousand miles away, the sound of popping.

Ed continued to stare. Was he dreaming? It made the most sense. He’d been on that couch the whole weekend, only getting up to make food and go to the bathroom. He’d nodded off a couple of times today. Maybe he still had yet to wake up. That was the only possible explanation. Cliché as it was, he had to be dreaming.

But even he couldn’t allow himself to buy that. When had he ever actually been aware that he was dreaming? Movies always pulled that trick, even a few he’d watched on that couch with groggy eyes, but he had never bought it. No one knows when they’re dreaming, he would always say. It’s a bullshit movie rule. Nobody just wakes up and then suddenly everything is fine.

Now he hated himself for being such a pretentious audience member. If he wasn’t dreaming, then what the fuck was he looking at? He needed an answer quick, because the thought of losing his mind was rapidly becoming a very real and very welcoming possibility.

Was she a ghost?

Ed had always held an interest in the paranormal, at least a passing one. He’d watch the Ghost Hunting shows when they were on TV. He’d share the closest things he had to unexplainable experiences when people were sitting around and discussing that kind of thing.

Footsteps in the dark that he knew could very well be the house settling. Branches scratching against the window in the middle of the night that sounded like fingers tapping against the glass. A teddy bear he had as a child that he had set down while he went to have dinner, only to find it in a completely different spot afterwards. Those were the closest things to a paranormal experience that he had ever had in his life.

Nothing like this.

Nothing ever like this.

Had anyone? Had something like this, whatever the hell this was, ever happened to anyone else? Ed almost laughed to think about it. Opening his laptop, googling “dead woman magically appears on couch” and being directed to a message board of people with similar experiences. It didn’t even sound that funny. It was instinctual to consult the Internet with a problem that needed to be fixed immediately and this was most fucking definitely that.

The only thing that stopped him from actually grabbing his laptop and opening it up was the fear that when he looked back up, the woman would be gone again. While that sounded ideal, he took no comfort in it. If she just appeared, the thought of her just disappearing was just as terrifying. Where would she appear next? And when?

He didn’t think she was a ghost, though. He couldn’t see through her, she didn’t look like an apparition. She just looked dead. What she was wasn’t really up for debate, now that he’d studied her long enough. The question was how she had gotten there.

For that, he had no answers.

However she had gotten there, the woman had been dead at least a week. He could smell her. It hadn’t been a noticeable smell, at first, or maybe he had been too shocked and too scared to notice. But he noticed now, alright. It was a damp, growing smell. Thickening the air by the minute. Her skin was dry, even cracked in places. There was some substance around the corner of her mouth. It looked almost like blood, but darker. She was in the early stages of decomposition, he didn’t need to be a doctor to know that much. But he was fucked when it came to any more details than that.

Ed had wanted to be a doctor for the first month of college before he saw what the workload entailed. He had changed his area of study to English, so now he worked at Best Buy. That was the simple story of his life. He loved simple. God, he’d always taken simple for granted.

He would do anything to have it back now.

Something odd, other than the obvious, struck him about the woman now: her dress. Her hair. If these were current fashions, they were incredibly modest. Curled brown hair, now thinning around the scalp, although that seemed to deal more with the state of her than her age. A plaid, collared blouse tucked into a long olive green skirt. Just going by his own limited knowledge, he would date that outfit to the late sixties.

The microwave dinged. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he longed for the person who had put that popcorn in the microwave. He wanted that Ed to come and rescue him from this. That Ed, whose only problem was deciding what to watch on TV.

The Ed he was now was not going to be able to handle this. He knew that. This Ed was going to lose or had already lost his mind.

For the first time in his life, he thought of blaming Mary. He conjured up and image of her in his mind and felt, at the moment, nothing but contempt. Why did she have to go? Why did she have to leave him here by himself and go off and have experiences and friendships and do things that human beings actually do in their lifetime and leave him here with a dead girl? A dead girl who was beginning to smell worse than a landfill?

That was the one question he needed answered if he was ever going to recover from whatever the hell was happening now: why?

Why him? Wherever she had come from, whoever or whatever she was, why did she have to pick him? There were a dozen other couches in this building she could have appeared on.

The smell was growing stronger. It was beginning to give him a headache. Someone was going to notice that smell eventually.

As strange as it was, that gave him absolutely no relief. Say someone did notice the smell and came down here to investigate things? Say they opened up the door and saw him here with the dead girl on his couch? Who on Earth was going to believe his story when he couldn’t?

Sure, he knew it was real. He was aware it was happening and that whatever it was it was happening to him, but that didn’t mean he believed it. That was a leap he just couldn’t make.

But he still had to think about this realistically. People were going to notice that smell and they were going to ask about it. That was the reality of the situation. As much as he didn’t accept the situation itself, at this point he would take whatever reality he could get. They would ask, and when they did, what would he tell them? He couldn’t let them inside, he couldn’t show them.

He couldn’t explain this.

Not to anyone, least of all himself. It was becoming increasingly hard not to look at it. He hadn’t wanted to at first, his eyes begging to look at anything but the body. And he didn’t exactly want to do it now, but it didn’t seem to be a matter of choice. He was beginning to reach the moment he’d been dreading since the nightmare began: he was beginning to accept the fact that it was there.

As to how it had gotten there, he had no explanation. Maybe there was no explanation. It hadn’t been there and then, all of a sudden, there it was. He didn’t much like it, but that was the truth—or the closest thing to truth that he had.

It didn’t make sense and he had to stop waiting for it to make sense because he knew, at this point, that it simply wasn’t going to. Whatever happened here tonight was entirely outside the natural order. In the grand scheme of space and time and the laws of physics, this was a momentary hiccup and he had simply just had the rotten luck of being here to witness it.

He wanted to scream.

He thought maybe he already had at some point, but he was so dimly aware of himself in this situation that he couldn’t really say for sure. Ed tried to calm himself and was disturbed at how easy it was. He didn’t want to deal with this, but somebody had to. As much as he wanted to convince himself otherwise, there was no lie he could come up with that would make people believe he was not responsible for this dead woman’s body.

Which meant that he needed to find something to do with it. Disregarding smell, he had the whole weekend to figure something out before Mary returned. But he wasn’t sure he could look at it for a second longer. Each moment he glanced at the thing on the couch was another moment closer to the loss of his sanity. A door that, once closed, would not open again.

To hell with that.

Ed decided to make himself some food. He’d almost set off the smoke alarm ignoring whatever he’d begun to make a lifetime ago in the moments before discovering the thing on the couch. He wasn’t hungry. In fact, he was absolutely certain that he would not be able to eat.

But he had to do something. Something that would keep his hands and his mind busy. Something that would keep him from looking over in the corner for as long as possible. He discarded the bag of popcorn and set out to make something that would at least take a few minutes. He cursed his poor cooking skills, but there was no use dwelling on it. Even a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese would offer a few sweet minutes of bliss.

Ed started preparing the food, instantly unsettled once he turned his head away from the body. He wasn’t sure why, couldn’t quite explain it, but it was nonetheless what he felt. Keeping it in his field of vision was like staring into a black, meaningless void and yet turning away from it was like a sharp punch to the stomach. For now, he would take the punch.

Pot set. Stove on. Ed watched the water boil, fixating on each individual bubble that rose to the surface. For a stretch, he even forgot to blink, he was so intent to stare.

Water boiled.

Macaroni dumped in.

Cheese product stirred.

It felt like the whole process was over in seconds and he found himself becoming desperate for something, anything to add to it, but he could think of nothing. His distraction was all too brief, and now he had to return to his reality, whatever it had become.

Ed dropped a spoon into the pot and picked it up to carry it toward the living room chair. He didn’t want to eat across from the body but, in a weird way, he didn’t want to eat anywhere else. It wasn’t that he had, in whatever time it had been, grown attached or become protective of it. He hadn’t. His concern was simply for the fact that he didn’t know what would happen if he just left it there. What if somebody came into the house? Even a burglar would have the immediate upper hand if they came inside and saw that.

So he had no choice but to sit at the chair, eat his hollow food and try to be civil. He meant no disrespect to the woman, he figured, whoever she had been. Her death had probably been violent and definitely tragic, so he bore her no ill will. Ed resented only the situation, only that she was here. It didn’t so much matter who she had been or who she was because it wouldn’t change anything. Nothing about her would help what was happening to make any sense. So he left the thought alone.

He ate. It tasted like ashes and chemical paste, but even that was a welcome distraction. Bringing the spoon to his mouth, he hit a tooth and almost chipped it. Funny, he hadn’t even realized his hands had been shaking. But he ignored it and continued on until the bowl was near empty.

As Ed went in for his last few bites, he felt a change in the air. Something was wrong. Even if there was nothing different that he could see, he felt it like a shock of static electricity rippling through the air. Something was different and he had no idea what it was.

For once, he forced himself to look at the body.

It had not changed position. Not even gravity had made any kind of an impact on the body, as if it was an image superimposed over his usual, comfortable vision of his household. Nothing was out of the ordinary, except the obvious. Yet still this feeling persisted.

Before he could even form the thought to wonder why, he had his answer.

The thing opened its eyes.

They were puffy, red and veiny along the eyelids, but white in the center, the irises pale and colorless. Translucent. The pupils were dilated so small they may as well not have been there at all.

This time, Ed did try to scream but his whole body froze and choked up and the sound came out like a cat coughing up a hairball. He dropped his food, but didn’t notice, not even as he stepped into the squishy, pulpy mess as he rose to his feet.

Finally, he stopped thinking about whatever it was he was looking at or where it had come from. Instead, he ran as quickly as he could, praying it would not grab him with an icy hand as he went by because then he would scream and who knew what would happen next.

He reached the bedroom and slammed the door behind him. For the longest time, he stood with his back against it, panting. It had felt like running a marathon, making it from the chair to that door. Ed tried to listen but, for now, could hear nothing but the pounding of his own heartbeat. It was racing, thundering and he noticed that he could feel it pounding within himself as well, as though clamoring to get out.

He prayed for a heart attack.

But it did not come. Instead, he collapsed to his knees with his back still firmly up against the door. Ed knew he could lock the door and make it to the bed, but how would he be any better off over there? What was he going to do, sleep? No. For all he knew, a lock wouldn’t do anything to keep this out, whatever it was.

Maybe he had rushed to think it wasn’t a ghost. After all, he had never seen a ghost before. Who was he to say what was and what wasn’t? This was a dead woman from a clearly different time than his own. Sure, for awhile there, she had only been an unmoving body, but now she—it had opened its eyes. That sounded like a ghost to him.

But it didn’t and he knew it didn’t. It was simply another justification. However crazy it sounded, a ghost would be reasonable compared to this. Ghosts were things that people did experience, or at least believed they did. He had never heard of anything like this.

Ed tried not to think about it. About the fact that it was still out there lying on his couch. Or maybe drawing closer. Maybe it had dragged itself off the couch, limbs still weak from decades-long death and was crawling across the carpet, leaving a snail trail of grime and puss.

He closed his eyes and clenched his hands together so tightly they began to go numb.

And then the unthinkable happened: he fell asleep.

Ed couldn’t say what time it was when he woke up, but it wasn’t quite light out yet, judging by a quick peek through the curtains. Only darkness out there. He pressed his ear to the door to hear what he could hear.

Nothing from the other end. Maybe he’d simply dreamt it. Maybe he’d dreamt the whole fucking thing.

He knew it wasn’t true, but he needed to think it, at least for a moment. Then, a worse thought—and he knew it. He thought about opening the door and stepping back out there. It was the worst idea he’d had all night, but what else was he going to do? Barricade himself inside of his bedroom for the rest of his life?

What was he hoping to find once he opened that door? Say he walked out there and there was nothing on the couch. Would that confirm that he had dreamed it, or would it mean that it had moved? One was, of course, much more comforting than the other. It wasn’t worth the risk.

Yet it was a risk he felt compelled to take. Whatever had happened out there, whether the thing had opened its eyes to glare at him or it had been a momentary spasm, it didn’t change the fact that if there was a dead body in his house and he couldn’t explain how it had gotten there, not a single person would believe he had not killed it.

Christ, even he was starting to have trouble believing that himself.

No. He needed it done. Over. Whatever the cost, he was willing to pay it. The minimum bid, he suspected, was his sanity. Against every ounce of judgment in his body, Ed opened the door and stepped back out into the living room.

The couch was empty. Just as he thought, he had no idea if he should be relieved or look for a weapon. To be safe, he made a beeline for the kitchen and grabbed the largest knife he could find.

But he could not see the body hiding anywhere. There were places, of course, that it could have found in the time he had been asleep. Was that what it was playing with him now? A monstrous game of hide-and-seek? Ed thought about the most obvious place: under the couch. But the thought of actually bending down there to look for the thing chilled him to the bone. So he stood in the center of the room, holding the knife close. He’d be able to see anything from here if it made a move. And he would stand here forever if he had to. Until his knees gave out and forced him to fall, he would stand.

Ed tried to think that maybe he’d only need to stand long enough to convince himself it had been a dream, but couldn’t form the thought without feeling the bile rise in his throat. It was a lie and he knew it. Even if it had simply been a dream, it was a dream powerful enough to change him fundamentally and irreparably. Whether or not he’d actually seen the thing on the couch, he’d be waiting for it for the rest of his life. He’d wake up every night expecting to see it standing over his bed, starring back at him with wide, pale eyes.

He begged for its return. A fight. A confrontation. Anything would be better than this.

It came eventually, after a few more minutes (or hours, he couldn’t really tell) of standing, though not in the way he had expected. There was something flickering on the couch, as if a transmission was coming in choppy from somewhere else. It looked almost like the tracking on the shitty VCR he’d had as a kid, a heavy and clunky piece of crap he’d cherished even when all of the other kids had moved onto DVD. Ed couldn’t make sense of it, but had stopped trying to make sense of anything.

He was looking at tracking, somehow physically in front of him, in a world he would begrudgingly still define as real.

And then, just like that, the body had returned. In the same position, exactly where he had left it, including the eyes.

What did that mean? Did it disappear when he did? Was it tied to his presence within this room? Maybe it was some kind of hologram.

But he knew otherwise. Whatever it was, it was physically here no matter how much he wanted it to be or not.

Ed remembered the knife in his hand. It was time to bring this to an end.

He forced himself toward the thing on the couch, as still as it had been since the moment it first appeared. His leg brushed against the couch cushions, and Ed was so on alert that he actually yelped.

The thing’s dead eyes rolled back to look up at him, looking like they might fall out of their sockets in the process.

Ed froze.

The dead woman slowly split her purple lips into a wide smile.

Finally, Ed screamed, the doorway in his mind slamming shut and locking him out forever.

***

“What happened?”

“Well, that’s what we’re trying to tell you, Miss. We don’t know.”

“I…” Mary swallowed her anger, her frustration, but her confusion was devouring her. “I don’t understand,” she said.

The detective, Barrowman, gave an exasperated sigh. “That’s the thing,” he said. “Nobody does. Believe me, I wish I had something else to tell you. But this case makes less sense than anything I’ve seen in my life and I don’t want to lie to you and tell you we’re ‘still putting the pieces together.’ I don’t think you want me to do that either.”

“No. I guess not. But if you would just tell me something, anything, then I could start to respect your decisions, but you haven’t. Instead, I come home from a weekend out with no word from Ed, but I don’t think anything of it because we’ve gone longer than a day or two without texting before. But then you pull me away and tell me that my husband is dead without telling me why or how. What do you expect me to do in this situation, detective? What would you say if you were me?”

“Fine,” he said, cutting another sigh short to look her in the eye. He wanted to level with her, she could at least see that much. But what he had to say was a very hard thing to put into words. “Fine. Yes. You were out with your friends, several of them, all who could place you at all the locations you gave. You’re not in any trouble here, but… while you were away, your upstairs neighbor—”

“Bertie?”

“That’s correct.”

“You got a statement from Bertie? I’ve never even heard her speak.”

“Believe me, when motivated, she can sing,” the detective said, but his voice was humorless. “She smells something coming from that apartment and knocks to make sure everything’s alright. Knocks for a few straight minutes before she realizes that the door is open, at which point she opens it and discovers your husband lying dead on the couch.”

“What happened? An aneurysm? Was it sudden?”

The detective winced at that, as if repressing a laugh. Or a scream. “That’s the thing, Mary. You say that you last saw your husband on Friday and it’s now Sunday. God help me, we can even confirm that it is true.”

Mary shook her head in confusion. “Why is that a problem?”

“Believe me, we’ve had the coroner check and double check and go back and look things over from every conceivable angle but—“

“Just answer my question. Please.”

“Because,” said the detective, “When we pulled your husband off that couch, he had been dead at least a week.”