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Before we begin, I have three things to highlight:
One, I’d like to talk about
’s substack Are You Not Entertained? His newsletter discusses sci-fi and its impact on our real life. So, naturally, I’m on board.His recent post on the movie, Prey, is excellent. Check it out if you have a quick minute. Eric’s writing is concise and he highlights excellent ideas, like how Prey nods to fans of the franchise, while also keeping things tight and punchy. If you’re keen on checking him out, here’s his publication.
My second item: Realms of Roush is now just Realms. Though I don’t quite have a master plan yet, this title change is a thematic move toward what I’d like to create: a community and haven for writers and writing in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Maybe one day it’ll be a magazine. Maybe one day it’ll be a multimedia empire. Who knows? (Sidenote, if you’re a sci-fi and/or fantasy writer, let’s connect! I’m looking to do more shoutouts and collabs!)
Lastly, you can check out my Realms review on the Red Rising series - a must-read set of novels for any sci-fi lover.
That’s all! Thank you. And without further ado, here’s the story…
A Leaky Fountainhead
My father was a draftsman.
He did the grunt architecture work for a company in the city, drawing foundations and floor plans like a burger joint cooks fries. The work was simple. He hated it. He never called the company by its name. I knew it only as the Firm.
Despite his displeasure, watching him draw blueprints 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 hunting prey. 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. Their strength was evident in the gathering of muscle on each finger and between his thumbs and pointer fingers. The only blemish he allowed was that of pen or pencil, the outside of his pinkies and palm permanently stained gray-blue. He worked seven days a week, dawn till night. My mother’s job was to raise me, and at this, she was a savant.
My home was filled with simple materials like leather and concrete, joy and light. The spaces were brought to life with my mother’s hummingbird presence and my father’s scratching pencil.
You’ll notice I speak of them in the past tense. Those fond days are gone. All I have left is a bright dream that ends in a nightmare.
The nightmare began when my father met a wealthy coward.
My father went into the office one day, likely to pitch a new idea to his 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 joint vacation to the beach. That was not a fun day. The man’s kids didn’t like ice cream - and that’s all you need to know.
Next thing I knew, my father was building this man’s dream home.
My father gave his soul to it. 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… He prayed to it like it was God.
When the house was under construction, its design was already garnering awards. People at the Firm were getting jealous, and my father’s boss threatened termination if he didn’t abandon his mistress of a side gig. My father quit on the spot, believing his inevitable career as a true architect was taking flight. Those perfect hands flew as he constructed new iterations of this home for prospective clients, the wealthy 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 don’t remember a time before then when we had actually eaten together at the dining table. I hadn’t known we had a dining table, even.
A phone call rang, interrupting the meal. Mom answered.
“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 quiet.
My father had stiffened in his chair, wearing an expression that haunted; as if an actual knife was working into his heart.
He was dead at that moment, though he stood and left the table.
That cowardly man never called again. Never invited us over. The house was finished by 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.
And this was just their 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 work! He stared at his drawings for hours. Stared at them burning in the fireplace. Stared at his empty drafting table. Stared at his hands, also empty. His descent took no time at all; that phone call came and his god was dead. He was dead.
One day I came home from school with the garage door a foot off the ground. A river of dark liquid, like syrup, spilled down the driveway. Perplexed, uncertain what I saw, I crawled beneath the door. My father was on his hands and knees, slipping in liquid, looking for something. “Son, son, have you seen my hands?” He smiled crookedly and collapsed on the epoxied floor, blood making a halo around his torso.
It only took one moment to see: arms were bleeding stumps. His hands twitched beside the table saw like dying arachnids. His eyes lay open, vacant, and staring right at me.
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 crafted by hand. Oh God, his hands.
“Mom. Mom, what happened?” She stirred, met my eyes, and the tears took no time to fall.
“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?” My fear rang as loud as that final phone call did. The hands were missing. Did some animal grab them? Did someone from the Firm take them as a sick trophy?
That night, my mother and I tried to sleep in her room, but it smelled too much like him, so we took to the couch. It wasn’t much better there in his old study. I imagined my father’s outline in the dark, sitting in the tall chair near me, his utensils scratching away at someone’s office, designing where they would work and mingle and never know a day of sorrow like mine. A quiet tapping filled the night from the leaky kitchen sink my father never fixed.
That next day I went to school. I already understood that it didn’t matter what I did, my heart would break every day until it didn’t. School eased the focus on my father’s empty office, his empty presence. His stuff, everywhere, now belonging to no one.
Night came again. The sink was dripping all night, tapping harder and harder.
“Mom, do 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, knocking. It was his ghost at the desk, tapping a pencil while conjuring his next idea. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I fell asleep in class the next day. They let me come home early. As if that would help. I asked my mother not to take a pill that night. She took one anyway, blinded by grief. I taped the faucet over to stop that voracious dripping.
I was near asleep when the tapping came again. My heart rocketed to full thunder. Was that sound from my parent’s room? From the attic? From the dark places in the house? Something skittered frantically, the noise growing distant and small. It stopped somewhere upstairs. In my chest, I’d hoped that sound would get smaller and smaller and then disappear forever.
Taptaptaptaptaptaptap.
Closer now. A door creaked upstairs. Then, from the stairwell: Thump, tap-tap-tap. Thump, tap-tap-tap. It had to be a rodent. Had to be. What else could be searching so methodically?
Something slapped the concrete 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. Whatever it was skittered across the floor with its little taps, fast as an animal released from a cage. It went everywhere. The kitchen, where it knocked over a glass, shattering it on the floor. My heart almost stopped at the crash. Then the front room. Then the laundry room, where the thing tapped hard on the appliances, the metal sound like a midnight bell.
“Mom, please wake up.” She groaned and went back to snoring. I was alone. And it heard me.
The skittering thing came toward the sunken living room. I tried to disappear into the couch. I imagined myself invisible. My eyes were shut so hard I saw colors in the blackness. My father’s chair squeaked. The tapping echoed on his drafting table. Papers were feathered through. Something ripped.
Silence.
I breathed furiously through my nose, feeling suffocated for trying not to breathe. Then I felt pressure on my blanket, a light tugging. The pressure increased until I felt two separate weights. I felt them crawl like tarantulas up my body. I prayed to die right then and there so the horrors in my head wouldn’t come true.
They stopped on my chest, no doubt sensing its hasty rise and fall. After a moment they inched toward my head. They reached my face, and felt out its features, touching my eyes through the blanket. I expected to be seized and killed or have my mouth pried open so whatever they were could crawl inside my esophagus. These things did not happen.
I felt the tender touch of fingers on my face. I smelled…something familiar. Parchment and graphite and coffee. I knew what they were, without a doubt. A strange relief replaced the terror.
“Father?”
I peeled the blanket from my face. My father’s hands touched my cheeks like he was going to bend down and kiss my forehead, just as he did not four days ago. His hands, just then, wiped away my tears.
It wasn’t fair. He had been a good man. But he gave up because people kept building walls around him. He was a rat in a maze with no end.
Who was to blame?
Who drove him to give up his life?
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. Was that why his hands were possessed? Did he worship his work so much? Or was it love for me?
There was only one way to know.
I prepared myself, then I moved.
I wrapped up his hands in the blanket like a parent swooping up a child in a towel and twisted it tight. 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 full of mementos. I dropped the hands inside and slammed the lid closed. I flipped the latch, a simple hook and loop affair then returned the box to its place.
Come morning, I told my mother I was staying home from school that day. She kissed my forehead and went out, desperate to get a job somewhere, anywhere.
I strapped the box to the handlebars of my bicycle and went my way to the Firm. The pristine lobby was guarded by a kind man behind a desk, one who remembered me from my few visits. 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. “Do you smell something rotten?”
“Nope.”
I took the long elevator ride to the top. My shoes squeaked on the polished floors, looking so brilliant a shadow could have seen its reflection, and walked to the Firm’s 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 who knew my father.
“Jesus, kid, what are you doing here?”
“I brought this…”
He rushed me past the desk and through tall, wooden doors to his office overlooking the city. “What’d you bring there, kid?”
“Some things my father 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, to match the tapping inside. It drew the man’s eyes, but no more.
Two other men joined us there, in their dark suits. My father’s former bosses.
One lowered his cigar. “The hell?”
The other knocked back his drink, some dark liquid in a crystal glass, and said, “Why’d you bring him in here?”
The architect took my box and set it on the immense, luxurious desk that they probably bought through my father’s toil. From the work of his hands.
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, sure.”
“I have something I want to say.” The men chuckled, mocking me, then gestured for me to speak. I said, “I loved my father. His hands could do the impossible. But yours? Yours can do nothing. Yours are the hands of thieves.”
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. I turned around and went back to the office. I cracked open the door. Its luxurious hinges made no sound. Inside, the men stood at the ten-foot window, the box already forgotten. 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 nonstop. Little wuss. When my old man died, I never shed a tear.”
“Kids these days, softer than…” He held up his hands. “These.” They guffawed and slapped their knees.
On the desk, the lid snapped open. The sound drew the men’s attention from their humor and back to the box.
“Was that open before?”
“Couldn’t have been.”
The man with the cigar marched over to the box. “If that kid pranked us, I’ll—“
My father’s hands leaped onto his neck, were on the man’s face in an instant, thumbs in his eyes, squeezing. He lurched, cigar tumbling to the ground in a flare of smoke and ash. The other men laughed until their colleague started shrieking. The shrieking continued even when the cigar man’s body dropped to the ground and the hands pulled away from bloody sockets.
“Ugh!” one man let out, pressing himself against the window.
The hands scurried toward the other two, their fingers tapping softly on the vibrant rug.
One 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. Now he was screaming.
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. I heard footsteps behind me, the clap of expensive shoes on the ground. I ran the opposite way, afraid of getting caught.
“Help! Help!”
I didn’t look back. 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. I couldn’t help myself. Beyond the doors sliding shut, I caught the distant terror of people so certain they couldn’t be touched by pain or clawed at by the men that crawled beneath them. Their terror was true and deep and would change them forever. Sometimes I feel satisfied that those people got what they deserved. 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 did the most brilliant things.
And that’s A Leaky Fountainhead.
On the topic of spooky season…
1. What’s your favorite spooky media? What should I be watching, reading, or listening to?
2. What scares you? Demons, gore, or shadows at night?
Thank you for reading and listening!
Until next time, Realm Walkers, this is Zach and you’re listening to Realms.
A Leaky Fountainhead - Redux