A Leaky Fountainhead
A short horror story...
My father was a draftsman.
He did the grunt work for an architecture firm in the city, drawing foundations and floor plans like a retail worker hangs clothes. The work was simple. He hated it. And no one took his own architectural designs seriously.
I couldn’t tell you if my father was a genius or if he just enjoyed designing out-of-the-box buildings. Things that might exist with an exorbitant amount of money and time. The wealthy usually have plenty of one, but not the other. On more than one occasion, my father met a wealthy individual with a penchant for whimsical architecture, and they would entertain my father’s fancy for some time. He’d be full of vigor for days, weeks, as a rich magnate courted him, perused designs and dreams, only to dump him like moldy leftovers. Then he’d be back at his humiliating drafting, grumbling to himself as he made perfectly straight lines, as he put together boring offices and suburban housing complexes.
Despite his displeasure, watching him draw brought me delight. His home office took up the sunken living room in our strange house in an old neighborhood (the only neighborhood with any character, my parents agreed). From the landing, I watched his hands flip and fly, angle and travel across his blue pages like hawks. He was an unremarkable, squat man, two physical traits I inherited, but his hands were masterpieces. They were wide, with fingers that suited the width. They were smooth and lightly veined, looking sculpted. The strength in them was evident in the gathering of muscle between his thumb and index fingers. The only blemish he allowed was that of pen or pencil, the outside of his pinkies and palm permanently stained gray-blue. He smelled of used paperback novels and coffee, and he had the habit of dipping biscotti in his dark brew.
I watched him when I could. I had plenty of chances. He worked seven days a week, dawn till night. My mother took me to school and other functions, fed me clothed me, did everything she could to make me a free-thinking young man. Her job was to raise me, and at this she was a savant.
You’ll notice I speak of them in past tense. This is because those days are gone, forever. My mother’s a recluse. My father’s dead. All I have left are the memories few, blurry memories untouched by nightmares. My home was once filled with simple materials like leather and concrete, the spaces brought to life with my mother’s hummingbird presence and my father’s scratching pencil.
The nightmares began when my father met a wealthy coward.
And it went the way it always did. My father went into the office one day, likely to pitch a new idea to his jealous bosses, and met the man in the lobby. They hit it off. Then it was lunches. Then dinners with the man’s family. Then, and this was beyond me, a hateful joint vacation to the beach.
Next, he was building their dream home.
My father gave everything, even his actual work hours, to this man’s home. A masterpiece, he said. A vision, he whispered. It will sit on the coast and drink in the ocean like Poseidon’s eyes. It will be light and airy, heaven on concrete. It will last four hundred years. It will… It will… It will…
The house was under construction, its design already garnering awards. My father had finally won the lottery with his ambitious blueprint, with his constant certainty. People at the Firm were getting jealous, my father’s boss threatening termination if he didn’t abandon his mistress of a side-gig. My father quit on the spot, believing his career was taking flight, like a hawk. Those perfect hands flew as he constructed iterations of this home for prospective clients, the coward’s friends.
One night our little family was eating together, laughing and enjoying my father’s freedom, his first taste of it in a while. I didn’t remember a time before where we had actually eaten together at the dining table.
A phone call rang, interrupting the meal. Mom answered. She quickly became frustrated, confused.
“Fired? What do you mean? No, talk to my husband. He’s right here. Difficult to work with? Impossible? He’s given you everything! You can’t breach the contract! You piece of—“
A dead tone bled into the open-concept dining room. The lights buzzed louder than usual.
My father stiffened in his chair and became a statue, wearing an expression that a sculptor would have given their life to imitate; as if an actual knife was working its way into his heart.
He was dead in that moment.
The cowardly man never called again. Never invited us over. The house was finished by the contractors and stood perfect along the coast. It won awards. It won acclaim. But all of it went to a different architect, one from the Firm. Evidently, they pressured my father’s former friend to betray him.
And this was just the Firm’s opening move.
They walled him off from his old job and poisoned the architect watering hole for hundreds of miles around. He couldn’t get another job. My mother couldn’t get anything more than temp or entry-level work. It was like the whole world was punishing us. My father took to drinking whiskey in his brew. Then moved on just to whiskey in his coffee cup.
He stared at his drawings for hours, started burning them in the backyard. Stared at his empty drafting table. Stared at his hands, also empty. His descent took no time at all; that phone call came and the devil claimed my father.
The nightmare only deepened from there…
One day I came home from school with the garage door a foot off the ground. A river of dark liquid, like syrup, filled the lip of the garage door’s threshold and spilled down the driveway. Perplexed, uncertain what I saw, I crawled beneath the door.
My father was on the ground, looking for something.
No. That’s what I wanted to see.
I blinked and saw the truth.
He was collapsed on the epoxied floor, blood making a halo around his torso, and a river toward the driveway. His hands lay on the saw’s table, and his arms were bleeding stumps. My eyes went from those jagged ends to the hands. They twitched still like he was trying to use them from across the grave. His eyes lay open, vacant, and staring right at my skull.
Everything went black.
I woke in my bed. The back of my skull throbbing, eyes pounding. Burned into my eyes were the body, the hands, the blood everywhere. My mother was there, sitting on a wooden stool my father designed and made. It was a prototype for the man’s house. His wife wanted a pottery studio.
“Mom. Mom, what happened?” She stirred, met my eyes, and the tears took no time to fall. “What about his body? Where is it?” I hated the thought of my father’s body lingering in the garage.
“They took it—him—to the hospital already. And,” she paused, “I have to ask you something…Do you know if he did something with his hands? Did you—,” she shook her head, “did you move them?”
“What? How could you ask that? I…I don’t know!” My fear rang as loud as that final phone call did. The hands were missing. Did some animal grab them? Did someone else grab them? How could they be missing?
My mother and I tried to sleep in her room, but it smelled too much like him, so we took to the couch. I didn’t sleep that night. I imagined my father’s outline on the tall chair near me, his utensils scratching away at someone’s home, designing where they would live and eat and never know a day of sorrow like mine. A quiet tapping filled the night, from the leaky kitchen sink.
That next day I went to school, feeling off but normal enough to do life. I already understood that it didn’t matter what I did, my heart would break every day until it didn’t. School eased the laser focus on my father’s empty office, his empty presence. His stuff, everywhere, now belonging to no one. Not even me.
It was the second night when those taps became something more than just a leaky sink. They sounded like little taps on wood, like rodents running across a beam.
“Mom, did you hear that?”
She’d taken a pill. There wasn’t any waking her. My childish imagination took flight with that tapping noise. It was my father’s soul, trying to break in.
I fell asleep in class the next day because there wasn’t a chance I could sleep with that tapping. I asked my mother not to take a pill that night. She took one anyway, just so she could leave behind my father’s ghost for a few hours.
The tapping came again. From my parent’s room? From the attic? From the dark places in the house? Something—They—skittered frantically, the noise growing distant and small. They stopped somewhere upstairs. In my chest, I’d hoped that sound would get smaller and smaller and then disappear forever.
Thump, thump, thump.
Closer now. A door creaked upstairs. Then tapping came from the stairwell, a testing of the stairs. Then small thumps as whatever They were descended. Thump, tap-tap-tap. Thump, tap-tap-tap. What kind of rodent was so methodical? So strangely active in an occupied house?
Something slapped the ground floor, like deli meat on a counter. My throat seized up. I threw the blanket over my head and tried to be as still as a statue. They skittered across the floor with their little taps, fast as an animal released from its cage. They went everywhere. The kitchen, where they knocked over some glasses. Then the front room, where it sounded like they jumped on and off the chairs. Then the laundry room, where they tapped hard on the appliances, the metal sound like a midnight bell.
I whispered, “Mom, please wake up.” Pushed on her with my foot. She groaned and went back to snoring.
The little things stopped moving for a moment before skittering their way here, to my father’s office beside me.
Oh God, they heard me.
I tried to sink into the couch. I imagined myself invisible. My eyes were shut so hard I saw colors in the blackness.
They scaled his stool and it squeaked. They tapped across the drafting table, rifled through his things, and slowly ripped some pieces of paper. I almost screamed at the sound.
Silence.
I breathed furiously through my nose, trying to make it quiet, almost out of breath for trying to slow it.
Then I felt pressure on my blanket, a light tugging. The pressure increased until I felt two separate weights. I felt them crawl like heavy tarantulas up my body.
They stopped on my chest, no doubt sensing its hasty rise and fall. After a moment they inched toward my head. They reached my neck, stood on my face, and felt out its features, touching my eyes through the blanket.
I expected these things to seize and kill me, or in my vivid imagination, pry open my mouth and force their way into my esophagus.
But, not.
They cupped my face and caressed it, through the blanket. The smell of parchment seeped through the cloth that was my only shield. Parchment and graphite and coffee.
I knew what They were, then, without a doubt.
A strange relief replaced the terror.
What should I do? I wondered.
What should I do about my father’s disembodied hands?
They gently held my face through the blanket. I slowly peeled it from my face. My father’s hands adjusted with the movement. I pretended my father was there in full, as his fingers touched my cheeks like he was going to bend down and kiss my forehead like he used to in the middle of the night when he finally retired from his drafting.
“My child, how I miss you,” they seemed to say. They even wiped away my tears.
It went like that for a while, until I got to thinking. I didn’t want these phantom limbs to crawl around my house, my life, going through the motions of my father’s existence, reaching for everything that he’d lost. Everything that he’d given up. Or had been forced to give up.
It wasn’t fair. He had been a good man. He was a good man who gave up because people took so much from him he imagined himself a rat in a maze with no end. He gave up when he still had mom and I.
Who was to blame then?
Who drove him to give up his life?
Who drove a wedge between that coward and my father?
And why did my father have his office in our TV room? Why not have his own studio, with his own draftsmen to scale the size of someone else’s shitter?
The Firm.
They’re the ones that turned him into a ghost of himself until he could no longer accept the reality of the living world.
Was that why his hands were possessed?
Given that his work was everything to him, I gathered that his reanimated hands did not want to spend their time pretending holding my mother’s hands, or ruffling my hair.
Then, a thought bubbled into my head. I wondered what would happen if I took those hands to the Firm, to my father’s former superiors. At the very least, I could shock them into dumb silence. I could make them disgusted. I could show them the fruits of their labor.
I prepared myself, then I moved.
I wrapped up those hands in the blanket like a parent swooping up a child in a towel, and I twisted it tight like a bag of bread. They struggled. They fought. They were fish in a net. I dragged the blanket on the floor so they wouldn’t touch me again, and I went into the garage, the floor spotless where they scrubbed the blood away, and dumped out a wooden box my father made for mementos.
I set the blanket inside and slammed the lid closed. I flipped the latch, a simple hook and loop affair then returned the box to its place. The items I dumped out were memories, pictures and things, from our family’s short existence. I hid them away.
“Tomorrow, the Firm,” I whispered.
I’d visited with my father enough to know the way. The building overlooked the ocean, had a prominent place in the middle of downtown. I told my mom I was staying home from school that day. She kissed my forehead and went out, trying to get a job somewhere, anywhere.
I strapped the box to the handlebars of my bicycle and went my way.
The pristine lobby was guarded by a kind man behind a desk, one who remembered me. He knew what had happened.
“I have this box for the Firm. It has some of their things.”
The hands moved inside, tapping loudly. I tapped my fingers on the outside to cover it up.
He looked at me, the box, then me again. “I can deliver it for you.”
“No, I want to do it,” I said.
“Head on up then,” he replied, a sad frown creasing his forehead.
I took the long elevator ride to the top. My shoes squeaked on the polished floors, so brilliant a shadow could have seen its reflection, and walked to the Firms double-height glass doors. The receptionist looked confused.
“My father worked here. I’m returning some things.”
One of the lead architects walked by, one that knew my father. It was the one who took over building the coward’s house.
“Jesus, kid, what are you doing here?”
“I brought this…”
“What’s in there?” He rushed me past the desk and through tall, wooden doors to his office overlooking the city. “What’d you bring?”
“Some things my father would have wanted you to have,” I lied. My heart pounded like the fingers inside the wooden box. I tapped on it as loud as I dared. It drew the man’s eyes, but no more.
“I can take that from you,” he said, as he showed me into his office. There were other men there, in their dark suits, looking shocked, then angry.
“The hell?”
“Why’d you bring him in here?”
I set the box on the immense, luxurious desk that they probably bought through my father’s toil. From the work of his hands.
I kept my back turned to them as they whispered and stared.
One of them had the audacity to put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry about your father, kid. He was a good draftsman.”
“And a better architect,” I added.
“Well, yes.”
I’d thought of a speech. I’d thought of many speeches. The words that emerged from my lips contained none of those pre-made thoughts.
I said, “I loved my father. His hands could do the impossible. And yours,” I looked at their soft, un-stained hands, “yours can do nothing. Yours are the hands of thieves, soft from stealing work and not doing it yourselves.”
I left the room, the box, and the three men.
I also left the lid unlatched.
A deep satisfaction rolled over me in sickening waves, a feeling that made me feel dirty and foul. But it also felt good. So good, I stopped in my tracks, and I couldn’t help myself. I turned around and went back to the office. I cracked open their door. It made no sound.
Inside, the men stood at the ten-foot window, the box already ignored. They joked. They laughed and cursed my father’s name.
“Yours can do nothing,” cigar man mocked. “What a little prick.”
“Did you see his eyes? Kid’s been crying his eyes out. Little wuss. I lost my dad to a car accident, and I never shed a tear.”
“Kids these days, softer than…” he held up his hands, “these.”
They snickered and guffawed.
On the desk, the lid snapped open.
The sound drew the men from their humor to the monolithic desk.
“Was that open before?”
“I heard it snap. Couldn’t have been.”
Cigar man puffed hard then marched over to the box. “If that kid pranked us, I’ll—“
My father’s hands leaped out of the box. That weird satisfaction returned, curling my lips into a grin. The hands were on the cigar man’s face in an instant, thumbs in his eyes, squeezing hard. He lashed out, cigar tumbling to the ground in a flare of smoke and ash. The other men laughed at first until they realized their colleague wasn’t making a joke, and when he started shrieking, they weren’t sure what to do. These big men, with all their invented power, with all their money and ego, shriveled before the terror of my father’s hands. The shrieking continued even when the cigar man’s body dropped to the ground and the hands pulled away from bloody sockets, thumbs stained red.
“Ugh!” one man let out, pressing himself against the window.
The hands scurried toward the remaining two, separating, making padding noises on the vibrant rug.
“Gah!” The man tried to stomp on the right hand, but it jumped and gripped his leg, then spidered its way up his back. He couldn’t shake it off in time. It reached his face.
My father’s left hand jumped and made a fist, punching the other man in the groin. When he doubled over, it gripped his throat. He choked audibly. The other man started screaming. I heard footsteps behind me, the clap of heels on the ground. I dashed away, feeling my heart in my throat.
Whoever ran toward the office cried out, screamed, and called for help. I didn’t look back. I looped around the office, following the hall back to the entrance. No one paid me any mind as I fled what I’d done.
The elevator dinged and I flew into it. I leaned heavily on the side of the metal box and cried. I laughed too. I was sick in my head and heart, but I couldn’t help myself. Beyond the doors sliding shut, I caught the distant terror of large men, of people so certain they couldn’t be touched by pain or clawed at by the men that crawled beneath them. Those fools were realizing how small they’ve always been.
In retrospect, I was having a feverish bout of bloodthirsty madness. To this day, I don’t know whether or not those hands were truly possessed. If they leaped out of that box with a vengeful fury. I never verified the truth online, as one might expect. It’s a memory that feels like a nightmare.
Sometimes I feel satisfied that they received a message, either at the sight of those hands, or in fear as they died by them. Other times, I just wish my father had found a way to go on. If not for the chance to create beautiful buildings, then at least to love my mother and I.
My father was a draftsman.
His hands could do the most brilliant things.
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