Unlovely- A Tale of Madness Read online

  u n l o v e l y

  A Tale of Madness

  R i s a F e y

  Unlovely: A Tale of Madness

  Copyright © 2018 by Risa Fey

  All rights reserved.

  Book cover design by Deranged Doctor Design

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Quotation

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  Also By Risa Fey

  ONE need not be a chamber to be haunted,

  One need not be a house;

  The brain has corridors surpassing

  Material place.

  Far safer, of a midnight meeting

  External ghost,

  Than an interior confronting

  That whiter host.

  Far safer through an Abbey gallop,

  The stones achase,

  Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter

  In lonesome place.

  Ourself, behind ourself concealed,

  Should startle most;

  Assassin, hid in our apartment,

  Be horror’s least.

  The prudent carries a revolver,

  He bolts the door,

  O’erlooking a superior spectre

  More near.

  ~Emily Dickinson

  CHAPTER 1

  THE MIRROR LOOKED menacing. Cora had rented the old cottage furnished, after having taken a virtual tour of the rooms and grounds on a clunky old public library computer with a frustratingly slow internet connection. At first Cora had admired the antique mirror, finding its shape and metal-wrought frame beautiful, although it did look a bit dour.

  Unfortunately, all the photographs that had been provided for the tour had evidently been doctored, not only to make the rooms look larger than they were, but also to make them look more vibrant and well-lit. In reality, the sofas and heavy curtains were drab, and the velvet pillows were balding, limned along the edges with clumped frays of dangling threads. The rug carpeting looked especially time-worn, decayed from many years of heavy treading. A stout, rectangular radio and a number of vintage twin-bell alarm clocks were lined on a row of shelving beside a hulking grandfather clock: obsolete relics of a bygone era. None of them worked properly, and if they did they were undependable. Even though the heavy pendulum of the grandfather clock still ticked and tocked, the hands on its face refused to budge.

  Upon switching the dial of the retro-faced radio to the “on” position, white noise and dead air space filled the room. Only a couple of local stations came through at all, and the hosts’ voices were too fuzzy to be made out.

  Cora figured only the loneliest of people must have rented the cottage previously: misanthropic neurotics, crazed or blinkered retrophiles, unsociable artists, and the occasional city-wearied writer retreating into solitude. But no one had rented the place before her, or so the sweaty, red-faced landlord had informed her. No one had lived on the property since its last tenant moldered into a stupor and quietly died in the early 90’s.

  He—or she—must have been a crazed, blinkered, unsociable misanthrope, Cora decided.

  The few mirrors in the cottage were bleared with age and covered in a layer of fine dust. The floorboards creaked precariously, and the doorframe of the main entrance leaned slightly askew, but not enough to be a hazard. Ancient light fixtures buzzed with a yellow glow, and the intricately sewn lampshades muted the would-be brightness to a haunting dim.

  Cora resolved to replace the lamps at her earliest convenience—she preferred brightness and whiter light, but for now the bleak and eerie vibe would have to be endured.

  She had few things to unpack. Just a backpack with a cheap new cell phone, and some plastic bags of necessities she bought earlier from the local dollar store. The last of her stuff was in the bedroom—where the faintly sinister mirror glared at her from on top of the squat dresser like a blear-eyed portal. The image it reflected was too cloudy, but she was relieved it couldn’t reproduce her image. She was an ugly girl and she was tired of inanimate objects reminding her that she was so.

  After unpacking her scant pile of clothing onto hangers and into drawers, she decided against her better judgment and scrubbed the bedroom mirror with a microfiber cloth and blue cleaner. It required a decent amount of elbow grease. Adherent grime and sticky filth kept escaping the pull of the fiber’s adherent fingers, but eventually the cold surface was spotless.

  Cora’s hideous portrait seemed out of place inside the elegant frame. Her skin was grossly pale, unwarmed by sunlight, and her lower lip jutted out like a pouty child’s in self-loathing.

  She rifled around the room, locating the plain black scarf she wore occasionally on windy days. She draped the opaque fabric over the face of the mirror, averting her gaze so as to not accidentally see her pockmarked ugliness at close range.

  Perhaps it was a bad idea, but Cora cleaned the remaining mirrors in the other rooms. Compelled by a strong urge she couldn’t put her finger on, she scoured the gummy surfaces until they shined as clear as crystal. Only a few chips and minor blots of what might have been paint marred the otherwise flawless glass.

  Mirrors were nice for making rooms feel bigger than they actually were, but Cora never felt the need for them. A small part of her actually wished mirrors have never been invented, and she often wondered who the horrible, vain person must have been to have first conceived them.

  The only justification she could think of for looking at herself was for self-punishment. Her pouched, drooping eyes, caterpillar eyebrows, and androgynous anatomy disgusted her, so much so that she wished someone would throw acid on her face.

  Remarkably, however, she was feeling somewhat good about herself today, verging dangerously close upon self-confidence. She almost dared to believe that she was happy.

  Being finally eighteen years old, she had just run away from the literal madhouse of her parents, which was located in a northern city several miles up the turnpike.

  It had required all her wit and closet resources to manage the escape, but she had quickly found the answer to her prayers after searching online for many weeks with only a modicum understanding of how the internet worked.

  She had secretly outlined an escape plan, stowing a stack of lined paper containing the scribbles for her preparations under her bed mattress.

  Her father had almost discovered them one evening after coming into her bedroom, but he’d
been too drunk at the time to comprehend what he was reading. After a particularly violent bout of routine molestation, the papers had dislodged from between the bedspring and the mattress, and in her panic Cora had lunged for them—which inevitably had drawn her father’s attention to them.

  He had wrangled the rumpled papers from her fingers and slapped her in the face to get her off him. He had laughed at some of the diary entries that he read, but scowled at the others that referred to him directly. Cora’s plans had been summarized in shorthand bullet points on the last few pages, and he had merely grazed over them with increasing disinterest.

  If he’d been sober, her father might have suspected something, but at the time they had looked like nothing more to him than meaningless scribbles.

  After grumbling over the unpleasant things Cora had written about him, he’d kissed her roughly on the cheek before scattering the papers to the floor and leaving the room. Not long after, he had collapsed into an inebriated drowse upon the sofa, in front of the strobe-like flickering of the television screen. Sobbing quietly, Cora had gathered up her notepaper.

  Cora shuddered at the memory of that kiss. It was the only fatherly thing he had ever done, and the memory of it—the way he had done it—made her stomach turn.

  At her parents’ house, mirrors had been ubiquitous. She had not been able to turn in any one direction without running into the overlarge deformity of her nose, the blotchy discoloration of her arms, or the gouging pockmarks on her cheeks. She was a waxen, skinny thing. Cora had no feminine features to be spoken of—save for that which her father had abused. Her pitch-black hair was chopped unevenly above the shoulders, and its masses were as dry as kindling. Her lips were thin and chapped, teeth crooked and crenulated with ridges.

  It was all why she chose to cover herself in plain long dresses, and tugged her hair back into ponytails. While it didn’t make her beautiful, it at least disguised some of the ugliness.

  “You certainly didn’t inherit your looks from either of us,” her mother, Cathy Himmel, had once said while ironing Cora’s school dress. “When I first held you in my arms, dear, I knew right away what the doctors didn’t: something was very wrong with you.” Steam hissed and billowed from the hot plate, forming little mushroom clouds that disintegrated within seconds. “The alien gods had cursed my womb since long ago. However, I didn’t expect you’d grow to be so ugly. Yet here you stand.” She gazed haughtily at her daughter, down the line of her stalwart nose. “You’ll be stuck with me and your father for decades more to come, I’m sure. No self-respecting man will ever want to date, let alone marry you.”

  Those remarks had left soul-deep wheals over her heart, where they still remained to this day.

  The first time Cora had been told such things, she’d been in that phase of romantic girlhood where all she wanted was to be with her knight in shining armor. She had imagined he was a kindhearted man and would one day come to sweep her off into a magical kingdom of love and beauty. But that day had never come, and her knight in shining armor forever eluded her, dissolving into one of many fairy tales from her girlhood that she no longer believed.

  There were four mirrors in the cottage in total.

  The one in her bedroom was the only one she bothered to cover. The bathroom mirror was beginning to crack around the edges. The third was wall-mounted in the tiny hallway, stretching nearly to the floor—which made it tolerable for checking her outfit. The fourth was in the living room: a round decorative glass.

  “Ever catch sight of your own eyes in the mirror?” her mother had once asked. “That’s Them looking back at you. That’s Them watching your every move through your own eyes. Aliens in the mind—the alien gods—looking out as if from a mask. They laugh even when you cannot hear Them. They mock your stupidity behind your back. They mourn Their faulty workmanship: the ugly, worthless thing They forced to come out of me.”

  “Who are They?” Cora had asked, innocently wide-eyed and absorbing her mother’s paranoia like a sponge.

  Cathy pressed the clothes more furiously. The water reservoir in the iron sloshed, and the hot plate fizzled and hissed. “Intelligent life. The Other life. The cosmic creators of the world as we know it. They built me and your father from the mud, like Adam and Eve.” Then she sneered. “But They botched you up, as you can clearly see. Now we’re stuck with you for the rest of your pathetic life.”

  At present, Cora stared at the black veil. The scarf was semi-transparent, but still thick enough to keep her warm against autumn drafts. She could just make out the hazy outline of her head and shoulders in the mirror behind the veil’s fluid folds. The bulk of an overstuffed bookcase loomed behind her, the ancient spines shorn and crumbling.

  Firelight blazed dimly beyond the bedroom threshold in the living room. Its orange glow looked dingy in the mirror.

  Cora’s mind strayed as she gazed into that dull fireglow. Her vision blackened around the edges, crumbling inward as if it were singed with fire. A catatonic trance came over her, and all at once she recalled an incident with her father in front of a winter’s warm-lit hearth.

  The screams were fresh in her memory, the unremitting stabs of his invasion relived anew.

  The memory faded mercifully.

  A dark figure moved by her in the mirror, disturbing her from the paralytic reverie. Cora turned around, sensing the presence of an uninvited visitor—but she saw no one.

  “They will never leave you alone,” her mother had once said, again while ironing.

  Always ironing.

  “No… They never left me alone, after all, and They will never leave you alone either. You’re no exception to the rule, my dear. They watch over Their creations, diligent as gods. Only… They’re about as heedful to a human’s cries for help as a grizzly in the forest.”

  “Why me?” Cora had asked, feeling unworthy of anyone’s attention, let alone Their’s.

  “You may be a monster, Cora,” her mother had said in a sympathetic tone, “but you are still Their experiment in this cosmic laboratory called life. In that way you are important to Them, even in so feeble a capacity. But don’t let that fact go to your head, my dear. They need to learn everything They can from studying you, so don’t inflate that already misshapen head of yours with ideas of self-worth. At the end of the day, you are expendable. They only preserve your life out of convenience.”

  Setting the iron down on its base, Cathy lifted Cora’s finished school dress by its shoulders. In the very center of the bodice was the burnt-in triangular shape of the iron’s hotplate. “If you aren’t careful, Cora, They will grow a new ugly fetus in my belly, and it will be a sign that your life is to be ended. For your sake, you better hope I never have a second child. I’ll never forgive you if that happens. Now… go hang this in your closet. And go get your father.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “YOU’RE ONLY EIGHTEEN,” observed the old shopkeeper. His arthritic hands were folded neatly in his lap. “Why not go to college like all the other folks your age? Land yourself a good career instead of a dead-end minimum wage job like this one?” He peered at Cora from over his small half-moon glasses. The wrinkles around his frowning mouth were deep, cupping into shadows.

  Cora didn’t like the way Mr. Philips looked at her. It was disturbing, too intrusive, like he was prying into her mind, judging all her thoughts. It was impossible to hold even a moment’s eye-contact with him, since she knew he was reading her thoughts as plainly as if her eyes were an open book. And what made her growing sense of paranoia even worse was how much uglier she felt under the weight of his cold scrutiny:

  Her nose bulged. Her mouth was wrung into a red amoeba. Her bones jutted awkwardly. Her skin turned sallow. Her veins showed gray as if with coronary dust.

  He can read my mind, Cora thought. He’s watching what I’m thinking even now—he keeps somehow managing to catch my eye, and he knows that I’m suspicious. Perhaps if I act like I don’t know what’s going on, he’ll overlook the horrible thoughts g
oing through my mind.

  But then it struck her: If They find out about Mr. Philips’s ability to read my mind, then my life is over. They’ll recruit him, and They’ll use him to root out my worst thoughts. Then They’ll chain me up in a whitewashed room where They’ll perform experiments on my body repeatedly until it kills me.

  All that’ll be left of me are formless thoughts, floating in a greasy jar of preserving fluid.

  “I didn’t want to go to college,” Cora mumbled, grounding herself back into the present moment.

  The truth was: if she had gone to college, then there would have been a paper trail leading her parents to her dormitory doorstep.

  She had to escape them. She had to outright disappear.

  The old man’s cottony eyebrows rose slowly upward. “That’s not something one often hears.”

  Cora picked at a small cluster of fuzzy pills on her purple dress—a nervous habit.

  “I considered it,” she admitted with a shrug. “A couple of teachers told me I would do well enough. But…” Her fists tightened.

  Attending college just wasn’t feasible. All those eyes would be on her—even more than They already were. And then her parents’ interventions would be unavoidable. And the probability of failure—the likelihood of her plunging into debt would be far greater, which would only make her more dependent on her parents, and that was the last thing that she wanted.

  Her personality simply wasn’t strong enough to endure all that difficulty without going completely insane.

  “You’re not smart enough to go to college,” her mother had told her. “You should spare yourself the inevitable rejection. Do the right thing and just stay here with us. We love you, at least. We’ll find you a steady job and supplement the rest of what you need with government benefits.”

  “But, Mom,” sixteen-year-old Cora had argued in her smallest voice, “I want to be a geologist!”