The Spreading Stain

Ida was thirty-four years old and had been driving a forklift since she was twenty-two, which meant she knew a thing or two about heavy objects. So when a small woman with tired eyes waved her down in the church parking lot on a Tuesday evening, asking if she could maybe help move a filing cabinet, Ida figured why not?

"You work out at the supply warehouse, right? I've seen your truck," the woman said. She was maybe twenty-eight, wearing rubber cleaning gloves and a church polo shirt two sizes too big. "I'm Sonya. I clean here. Part-time."

"Ida. Yeah, warehouse. What's the problem, the cabinet?"

"It's in the basement and it weighs more than I do. Probably more than both of us, honestly." Sonya laughed a little, but it came out thin. "I'd ask Herman, the pastor, but he's sixty-two and I like the man alive."

"Sure, I can lift. Lead the way."

The church was the worn kind, the kind that had one service on Sundays and choir practice on Wednesdays and not much else. Inside it smelled like old carpet and candle wax. Sonya took her down a stairwell behind the organ, and halfway down the air changed. Damp. Cold in a way that the weather outside didn't explain.

"Geez, it's a swamp down here," Ida said.

"The boiler's older than Herman. Half the time it doesn't run." Sonya flipped a light switch and one bare bulb buzzed on over a concrete room full of folding chairs, boxes of hymnals, and a big gray filing cabinet squatting in the corner like it had grown there. "That's the beast."

Ida looked it over. "Two of us can walk it. You tip, I catch. Easy."

They got it moving, and it wasn't even that bad, and that should have been the end of it. But as Ida set it against the wall near the stairwell, her eye caught something on the floor. A dark patch, maybe two feet across, right in the middle of the concrete. It looked like an oil stain, except it was the wrong color. Not black, not brown. A deep purple-brown, like an old wine spill, and it had edges that didn't look spilled at all. They looked grown.

"What's that?" Ida pointed. "Somebody spill communion wine down here or something?"

Sonya went quiet. She stood with her hands on her hips and looked at the stain the way you look at a bill you can't pay.

"That's the other problem," she said. "It showed up five days ago. Thursday. I cleaned Thursday night and it wasn't there. Friday morning it was."

"Five days? That's fast for concrete to stain like that."

"I've scrubbed it. Twice. Bleach, degreaser, that orange stuff, everything. It doesn't fade one bit. If anything..." She stopped and chewed her lip. "If anything it looks a little bigger each time I come down. But I might be imagining that part. I hope I'm imagining that part."

Ida crouched down near it. Not touching. Just looking. Up close the stain had a texture, faint ridges like a fingerprint the size of a dinner table. And here was the strange part, the part she would turn over in her head for days after. Looking at it made something pull in her chest. Not fear exactly. More like when you stand at the edge of a high balcony and some dumb part of your brain says lean. Her hand drifted an inch toward it before she caught herself and shoved it in her jacket pocket.

"You okay?" Sonya asked.

"Yeah. Yeah, I just... it's a weird stain." She stood up fast. "What did Herman say?"

Sonya made a face. "Herman said ignore it. He said old buildings get damp spots and mold and it's not our problem, the diocese will send someone eventually. That was three days ago. No one's come."

"Has he even looked at it?"

"He looked at it. He looked at it for about four seconds and said, 'Well, it's not hurting anything,' and went upstairs." Sonya pulled her gloves off finger by finger. "I don't like it. I clean this building. It's mine to look after, sort of, and that thing down here feels wrong. Like it's watching. I know how that sounds!"

"It sounds crazy," Ida said. "But I sort of felt it too, so maybe we're both crazy." She tried to laugh and it didn't quite work. "Look, you need anything else moved while I'm here?"

They finished up, and Ida drove home, and that should have been that. A favor for a stranger, a weird stain, done.

Except it wasn't done, was it? Because that night Ida lay in bed at eleven and could not stop thinking about the stain. Not worried, exactly. Curious. That pulling feeling hadn't gone away. It had gotten louder, if a feeling can be loud. When she closed her eyes she saw the ridges in it, the way the edges seemed just slightly different from one blink to the next.

"This is stupid," she said out loud to her ceiling. "This is so stupid."

She got dressed anyway. Jeans, hoodie, work boots. She grabbed a flashlight off the shelf in the closet, the big one with the dying batteries, and drove back across town a little after midnight. The church parking lot was empty. The building sat there dark and patient, and every sensible cell in Ida's body said go home, and she parked anyway.

The front door was locked, obviously. But Sonya had mentioned the side door by the stairwell, and mentioned that the lock stuck, and sure enough it stuck and then gave with a shoulder shove. Sorry, Sonya, Ida thought. I'll lock it behind me.

Inside, the church was pitch black and dead quiet. Her flashlight beam swept over pews and carpet and the organ pipes, and everything looked exactly like a church at midnight, a church pretending nothing was happening. She found the stairwell and started down.

Cold. Colder than before, somehow, like the basement had been storing up chill all evening. Her breath fogged in the flashlight beam, which was ridiculous for October. She reached the bottom and swept the light across the floor.

The stain was gone.

No. Not gone. The spot where it had been was bare concrete, and for one second Ida felt this huge stupid relief, and then she moved the light and the relief died right there on the spot.

The stain was on the far wall now. And it wasn't a patch anymore. It was a column, six feet tall, climbing from the floor up the cinder blocks like ivy, if ivy were made of dark wine and had fingerprints. It had spread. It had absolutely, definitely spread, and Ida stood there with her heart hammering and her flashlight shaking in her hand.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay, that's. That's a lot of scrubbing, Sonya."

The stain shifted. She would swear on her mother's grave it shifted, a slow ripple running up the column like something under a blanket rolling over in its sleep. And that pull in her chest, the balcony lean, came back ten times stronger. Her boots did not want to walk backward. Her feet wanted to go forward, toward the wall, and some warm loose feeling was spreading through her that had absolutely no business showing up in a haunted church basement at midnight.

"What are you?" she breathed.

The stain rippled again, longer this time, and Ida got the strangest impression, in the back of her skull where impressions live, that it had heard her. That it was listening. That it was pleased.

She should have run. Any person with sense would have run. Ida took one step closer instead.

The flashlight beam caught the surface of the thing, and up close it was worse and better at the same time. Worse because the ridges were moving, tiny waves sliding across each other like a crowd shuffling in place. Better because, and she hated herself for thinking it, it was beautiful. Deep purple-brown, almost black in the middle, and where the flashlight hit it there was a wet gleam, like honey, like something that would be warm if she touched it.

"Why would you be warm?" she asked it. "You're a stain. Stains are room temperature."

The ripple went up the column again, and this time it paused at the top, sort of bunched there, as a dog tilts its head. Ida laughed. It came out wobbly but it was a laugh.

"Great. I'm talking to mold."

She knew it wasn't mold. Sonya knew it wasn't mold. Herman could look at it for four more seconds and it still wouldn't be mold. Ida had been driving a forklift around heavy pallets since she was twenty-two, twelve years of boring safe repetition, and not one day of that had prepared her for a living stain in a church basement at midnight. But here she was, and her boots kept wanting to move forward, and that warm loose feeling kept spreading, down her neck, across her chest, pooling low in her belly in a way that was frankly embarrassing.

Because she hadn't said it out loud yet, not even to herself. It wasn't just warmth. It was arousal. Actual, honest-to-God arousal, standing alone in a freezing basement in a hoodie. Her skin was tingling everywhere the cold air touched it, and her nipples were hard inside her bra, and there was a slow pulse between her legs that had no right to exist with nothing and nobody in the room.

"This is not normal," she told the stain. "Just so we're clear. This is not how I react to mildew."

The stain pulsed.

There was no better word for it. The whole column swelled, all at once, from base to top, and then eased back, and then did it again. In. Out. In. Out. Ida stood frozen with the flashlight and counted, because counting was something her brain could hold onto. About one pulse every second and a half.

"It has a heartbeat," she whispered. "It's a stain with a heartbeat. Fantastic. Great. Love that for me."

And here was the really screwed-up part. Her own pulse was falling into step with it. She felt it in her wrists, in her throat, her heart slowing or the stain speeding up until they matched, beat for beat, like two engines idling in the same garage. The warmth in her belly pulsed with them too. Every time the stain swelled, that ache between her legs swelled with it, a little harder, a little hungrier.

"Hold on," she said, and her voice came out low and scratchy and she didn't like what it was admitting. "Are you doing that? Making me feel like this? Because if you are, I'm walking out of here right now, and I mean it. Say so, or don't, but be straight with me."

The stain went still. The stillest it had been all night, the pulse in the column dropping to a slow crawl, and Ida backed up three steps to test it and stood in the cold with her arms crossed. Nothing dragged her back. Nothing pushed. The heat stayed exactly where it was, which was the embarrassing answer: it was hers. The stain had only been keeping time with her, the way a dog matches your walk, and now it was keeping its distance because she'd asked.

"Huh," she said. "Okay. Thank you." She took a breath, and then she walked forward again on her own, because she wanted to, and she was the only one deciding that.

Ida took another step. Then another. The concrete was ice through her boot soles and she barely felt it. Three feet from the wall now, close enough that the flashlight lit the whole column edge to edge, and up close the fingerprint ridges were finer than any finger, swirling into whorls and loops like her own prints had been stretched across a wall and dipped in wine.

"Can you understand me?" she asked. "Blink twice. Well. Ripple twice, I guess."

The stain rippled twice.

Ida's whole body broke out in goosebumps, and not from the cold. "Okay! Okay. Wow. You understand me. That's. Sure. Why not. It's midnight and I'm negotiating with wall mildew."

One ripple. Longer, slower. Almost like a laugh.

"You're not mildew."

Ripple.

"What are you?"

And this was the strangest thing of the whole night, stranger than the moving, stranger than the heartbeat. The answer didn't come as words. It came as a feeling pushed into the back of her skull, soft and huge at the same time, like being handed something with both hands. Warmth. Curiosity.