The Candle

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Title Page

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The Candle

About the Author

Publication History

More Dark Fiction from ChiZine Publications

“Did you blow out the candle?”

Tom lowered his book and turned toward Peggy.

Peggy lowered her own book and bit her lower lip. Why was it that she could remember what she had for breakfast every day this week, could even remember what she was wearing on most of those days, but couldn’t remember if she had blown out the candle in the living room?
Is this what middle age is
? she wondered.
The loss of short-term memory
? She hoped not. She was forgetful enough as it was; she didn’t need to help it along.

“Yes,” she said finally. Then: “No. I don’t know.”

Peggy watched as Tom laid his hand on top of his book. She noticed the wrinkles on his fingers, the white hairs on his knuckles, and thought,
We’ve gotten old, how did this happen
?

He looked at her fully now. “Well,” he said, “which is it?”

“Huh?” She looked at him quizzically; her own book had slumped forward and was now lying open on her chest. “I’m sorry, Tom. I must be sleepier than I thought. What did you say?”

“I asked if you remembered to blow out the candle.” He was getting impatient. “In the living room?”

She bit her lip again, and Tom had to repress an urge, one that had been growing stronger over the twenty-six years of their marriage, to reach out and pull her lip from under her perfectly capped teeth. It drove him crazy. Biting her lip while she was trying to remember something was one of her half dozen or so little gestures. It was enough to drive a man nuts.

“I really can’t recall,” Peggy said at last. “I remember lighting it, of course, because the window was open and the smell of oats was really strong tonight. And I remember turning off the lamp after the movie was over. You put the DVD back on the shelf and I picked up the glasses on the coffee table. . . .” She trailed off, lost in thought. “But I don’t remember if I blew out that darn candle.”

“Well, can you go check?”

“Why can’t you go?” she asked, a little testily.

“Because you lit the damn thing,” Tom replied, a little testily himself.

“Because I lit it?” Peggy repeated. “What are you, six years old?”

“Are you?” he shot back. “What is it, are you afraid to go into the living room in the dark?”

“Are you?”

“I’m already comfortable.” Then, as if to accentuate this fact, Tom nestled a bit further down under the covers and picked up his book again.

“I’m comfortable, too,” Peggy replied, a bit indignantly. She opened her own book as if she was deeply engrossed in it, a tight little frown squiggled on her face.

Tom heaved a big sigh. “Listen, Peg, I’ve gotten up twice already. Once to make sure the side door was closed and locked—because you couldn’t remember if you did
that
—and again to feed the stupid cat.”

Peggy looked at him and decided it was probably easier to submit now than to continue arguing about it. On the day she had married Tom, her mother had given Peggy two pieces of advice:
Don’t sign anything until your lawyer’s looked at it first
and
Never go to bed angry
.

“Okay,” she said, closing her book and putting it on the nightstand. “But this means you’re making breakfast in the morning. Blueberry pancakes,” she added.

From behind his book, Tom snorted good-naturedly to show that he was a good sport, that bygones were bygones.

Peggy flipped back the coverlet and slid her long legs out of bed. She was quite tall—taller even than Tom’s considerable five feet ten inches—and while she had always taken pride in her long legs, she didn’t much like looking at them anymore. Like Tom’s hands, they were starting to show their years. Not that it mattered. Her legs had the years
and
the mileage. When the floor creaked under her feet, she thought that part of the sound—surely not the greater part, but some part at least—was the joints in her knees letting her know that her days of junior varsity soccer and ringette were over—long over.

She pulled up the baggy cotton boxer shorts she was wearing, the ones with the Peterborough Petes’ logo on them, and reflected that her days of sexy lace underwear from I See France, the lingerie store downtown, were over, too.

This is where I ended up
, she thought as she ambled out into the dark hallway.
This is where life has taken me
.

It wasn’t as bad as she made it out. She had a satisfying marriage to a man she was still in love with, they had no major financial concerns, and they were both healthy. There were no kids because they had planned to wait until Tom’s first novel put them on easy street, and when it didn’t, they decided that the window had passed and, really, would it be such a tragedy if they didn’t have kids? They had a house that was paid for, a car that was only three years old, and a large nest egg for their steadily approaching retirement.
All of these things have brought me here
, she thought, walking down a dark hallway to the living room where they watched a lot of movies but not much living really took place.

* * *

Tom tried to get back into his book, but he couldn’t concentrate. He was distracted by vague feelings of guilt. He felt a bit like a guy who had taken a girl out on a date, then told her, no, he wouldn’t walk her home, even though it was dark out. Like a bit of a louse, if he was perfectly honest.

But it was just their living room, he reasoned. Nothing scary about that. He listened for Peggy’s footsteps, which should have been audible on the old hardwood floors, but he didn’t hear anything.

All of this over a stupid candle.

“Peggy?”

The house was an old Colonial, and even the cat, who weighed a whopping seven pounds, made the boards creak and pop as he padded around. It was not a house where you could sneak up on someone undetected; they could hear you coming a mile away. It had even gotten so he could tell, just by the different groans and creaks, exactly where someone was headed, from the living room to the kitchen, from the bedroom to the bathroom. The sounds had become as much a part of the house as the smell of oats from the Quaker factory across the river that wafted in through the open windows when the wind was blowing right.

From where he was lying in bed, he could see only a small sliver of hallway through the open doorway. The bedroom was located at the very back of the house; the living room was at the front.

He looked over at the clock on the nightstand and tried to figure out how long she’d been gone. Two minutes? Three? Surely not as long as five minutes. Long enough, he figured, to walk into the living room, check to see if the candle was still burning, and if it was, blow it out.

“Peg?”

No reply.

She’s screwing with me
, he thought.
She’s not answering because she’s pissed off
. Soon he’d hear the creaking floorboards and she’d stroll into the room and slip back under the covers as if nothing was wrong.

Fine, let her be that way. Two can play that game.

He picked up his book again. He tried to read.

Thirty seconds passed. It felt like thirty minutes. Tom closed his book with a clapping sound that seemed extraordinarily loud in the silent room.
Silent house
, he corrected.
Why is it so quiet
? He was so distracted that he had forgotten to put in his bookmark. He swore under his breath and jerked back the covers. He was sliding out of bed when he heard the sharp, unmistakable sound of a woman screaming.

His first panicked thought was that it was Peggy. That’s why she hadn’t answered him. Something was wrong. Had someone broken in? His guilt was no longer vague; it was as solid as the obstruction that had formed in his own throat and kept him from calling out.

But the scream hadn’t come from the house. No, he was sure of that. Tom’s gaze flicked toward the bedroom window. It had come from outside.

It wasn’t Peggy, he told himself,
assured
himself. It was someone in the house next door, or maybe even from one of the houses further down the street—it had certainly been loud enough. But it was muffled, too.

That’s because it came from inside one of the houses
.
Not from someone on the street
.

He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.

He climbed out of bed and walked over to the doorway.

“Peg? Where are you?”

Nothing.

He stepped into the hallway and out of the glow thrown by the bedside lamps. He was alone in the darkness. The smell of roasting oats was very strong. It was not an unpleasant smell, but it was one that had gotten old very quickly. His stomach made a protesting, groaning sound.

He walked into the darkened living room, the hardwood floor popping and creaking under his bare feet. He moved past the dining room table, the futon they had bought for guests to sleep on because they didn’t have another bedroom. The shapes of the couch and the loveseat were limned against the orange glow of the streetlights. He saw the candle, a smaller silhouette on one of the end tables. It was out. There was no sign of Peggy.

He started to turn around, to search the rest of the house, when he suddenly realized the room wasn’t empty.

Someone was sitting in the old wicker rocking chair, which was no longer in the corner of the room but in front of the wide bay window that looked out on McDonnel Street.

He was straining his eyes to see who it was when the candle on the end table suddenly flickered into low-burning life. Tom’s eyes were drawn to it instinctively. His mouth fell open. In the dim light he saw it was Peggy sitting in the chair.

It rocked forward and Tom jerked backward. He didn’t scream.
Not like the woman next door
, he thought randomly.
What had that woman seen? Her husband, maybe, sprawled out in his favourite recliner? What had he gotten up to do? Check to make sure the front door was locked? Bring in the dog
?

A cold sheen of sweat formed on his back. His pyjama top clung to him like a greasy second skin.

Peggy began to speak, but not in any tone Tom had ever heard in all the years he had known her.

“No questions, my sweet,” Peggy said in a sharp, clear voice. “No questions tonight. Just the answer. Your answer.”

What in the hell is going on?
he thought frantically.

The candle flickered, and Tom glanced at it again. A smell wafted over to him. It was a sweet smell, a ripe smell that he couldn’t identify. It didn’t make any sense. The candle was vanilla-scented. It was a smell he and Peggy both enjoyed, along with Autumn Spice, Apple Pie, and Desert Rose, a smell that had filled the room earlier that evening.

Something was wrong. Peggy was staring at the candle, too. He had seen her profile a thousand times over the years—a hundred thousand times—and he knew it as well as his own reflection. But there was something different about it now. Different in the same subtle way that the smell of the candle was different. It was clearly Peggy sitting in the rocker . . . and yet it wasn’t. Something was missing, or something had been added—something that changed her entirely and made her a stranger.

Tom jumped as another scream split the night. Was it someone else making a similar discovery? Was it someone he and Peggy knew, someone in their circle of friends, someone, maybe, who had spent the night on their futon?

He had sent his wife out here to do something. Now he bent over to do it himself. He felt Peggy’s eyes watching him. He could feel them crawling on his skin like beetles. His eyes looked up at the window, and from this angle he could see the moon. It was different, too. The shape was right, but the colour was all wrong. Tom took two deep breaths, one to steady himself and one to do what needed to be done.

Just pretend it’s your birthday
, he told himself.

Peggy whispered, “Make a wish.”

He blew out the candle.