Apprehensions and Other Delusions by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro Page B

all!”
    Back in her own flat, she listened for the words that Eric claimed could be heard in the sounds, but she could make no sense of it. She went to the bathroom and filled the tub, hoping that a warm soak would help her to sleep. She felt sweaty and sticky, and solid as granite. She wanted to be free of Eric Muir’s absurd notions. “He’s ridiculous,” she remarked to the walls as she peeled off her clothes. It would serve him right if she used all the hot water and he had to shave with cold. “He doesn’t want to tell Peterson to fix the wiring, or whatever’s wrong. He’s making it up.” She stared into the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, examining herself. In the cream-colored, steamy bathroom, her pallor made her appear transparent.
    She leaned back in the bath, letting the pulse of the music blend with the movement of the water and the blood in her veins. It wasn’t as bad as she used to think, that music. Once you accepted it, it could be fairly pleasant. The music wasn’t as disruptive as Muir’s ludicrous theories. Her life, she thought, was not so empty as Muir had made it sound. It was not awful or painful or degrading; it was not pleasant or fulfilling or challenging. It was just ... ordinary, she supposed.
    Perhaps it was nothing, and she was nothing, too. She laughed, but could not hear herself laugh over the welling music.

    * * *
    “Do you hear something?” Sandra asked Paul as they stopped at the top of the stairs, a bookcase balanced between them.
    “Just my joints cracking,” said Paul. “Where do you think this ought to go?”
    “In the living room, I guess,” she said.
    “It’d probably make more sense to put it in the hall,” he said.
    She nodded at once. “Sure. In the hall’s fine.” She got into position to drag the bookcase a few feet further.
    “We were lucky to get this place on such short notice,” he said for the third time that morning.
    “Great,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of time to pick and choose.”
    “All the more reason to be glad this place was available.” He shoved at the bookcase, cursing.
    “The upstairs neighbor said it was haunted.” She hadn’t intended to tell him that, but she was getting tired of his insistence at their luck.
    “Hey, he’s a theoretical physicist. Peterson told me about him. You know what those guys are like. Give me engineering any day.” He stood up. “Why don’t you bring up a couple of boxes? I can manage the sofa cushions on my own.”
    “Fine,” she said, glad to escape. As she came back up the stairs, she paused once more. “He said—the man upstairs—that she just disappeared. The woman who used to live here.”
    “Come on, Sandra,” Paul protested. “What’s in the box?”
    “Kitchen things,” she said, squeezing by him. As she passed the bathroom door, she paused again. “Do you hear something?”
    “Not again.”He rounded on her. “This is an old house. It makes noise. We’re not used to it. Okay?”
    She continued to listen, a distant, distracted frown blighting her face. “I could swear I heard ...”
    “There’s a lot to unload,” he warned her.
    She made herself go to the kitchen and put the box down. She stood listening a few minutes.
    “Sandra!”
    She shook her head. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

    About Become So Shining That We Cease to Be

    This story probably developed out of visiting a flat here in Berkeley, which, owing to some engineering oddities, magnified sounds from the apartment next door. The couple living there joked about their “haunted house” and it eventually—a decade later—mutated into this flat. The characters in the story came from wherever it is characters come from.

IN THE name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen. I, Brother Luccio, at the behest of the Prior of this monastery, have recorded the Confession of the lunatic known as Brother Rat, though he has said he was once known as Bertoldo