Liam was no senior citizen with dementia who, as newspapers sometimes report, walks off unattended for an hour to drown in a foot of water in a vacant lot; yet if anyone could get lost and die so close to a road, it would be him.
Fearing for his brother, the role of rescuer was inescapable. An owl screeched distantly; either an echo or human cry answered it. A tree had given in earth, yet supported the outline of a car. It faced in the wrong direction, and was not his car in any case: This means of conveyance was long abandoned.
Smoke again skirted the ridge and circled crowns of aspen. Headlights—perhaps those of the rental car—sliced through it. This assumption was unsupported when the two beams separated and dipped in a ghostly chassé. He was determined to catch one or both of these torchbearers descending toward him, yet once high ground was regained, the lights, were they not complete fabrication, had vanished. Any trace of tire tracks was likewise removed by drifting snow.
Would a concussion produce this effect? Liam, not trusting his judgment, followed the road’s declivity from the point where he joined it, since he imagined his brother would obey his own advice about walking downhill. Sure enough, in the middle of his path, a fresh set of footprints soon charted the same course.
The tracker followed this trail with as much discernment as may be attempted in failing light. When the prints doubled in number, he was confused as to when this occurred, though both sets moved in the same direction. A third set of prints was soon added to these, and Liam stopped to shiver over them.
He was pained to realize that these prints shared the same shoe tread; and he need not examine the bottom of his frozen feet to know he circled the same impossible stretch of road. Was he now to add hyperthermia to his injuries?
The owl on the ridge brought the stranded wanderer back to the present moment. The snow dampened its faint appeal, yet the screech, in lacking an echo, made for a suitable compass.
A fourth set of tracks were soon added—these were decidedly not his. One foot was bare and the other shoed. Moreover, this undisguised tracks belonged to a woman.
The tracker followed the snowy contours, yet, one by one, his sets of prints disappeared until only this troubled female trekker’s prints remained. It was possible more snowfall foiled him and buried his previous tracks, but the woman’s path was as fresh as any laid in their pursuit.
A snow mound rose on the darkening shoulder ahead. Its outline was unmistakably that of an automobile that had veered (or skidded) into rough. Two struggling headlamps glowed beneath the friable skin of its igloo. Liam approached the shape with apprehension, but no sense was made of tracks that simply halted in front of it.
The ice-crusted scab was poked until the door handle was freed. The snowy blanket tore like tissue paper where the door jamb was not yet frozen stuck. Liam slipped easily into the black cave. He groped the immutable silence, and though his fingers were numb and stiff, sensation leapt to their tips: He met with the sticking end of the artificial Christmas tree bought hours earlier.
The key was still in the ignition, but the battery, in aid of the lamps, was too depleted to turn over the engine. Liam did not imagined that so much time should have passed from his initial plunge from the road to his recovery of the car, but—again—he may have suffered a concussion.
The imagined himself warming where the wind was cut off. Minutes begged for substance of thought; this he supplied with a dim outline in the rearview mirror. An image was carried through a series of doorways; and here among the many occasions of seeing his living mother standing in a storm door window, sorrowfully watching her son back out of the driveway for his journey cross country, was the last occurrence of it…
His brave mother gained in definition through these reenactments of the final impenetrable minutes of her life. She was pictured as a personality rolling around under his closed eyelids, responding to her daughter’s pleas with calmness while a cool washcloth caressed one of her legs; her dog, Deirdre, licked the other.
“I’m burning up,” she said (not from the hellfire of damnation, but from her body shutting down one faraway notion at a time). “I’m just saying,” she joked quietly.
Lana shooed the dog.
“Let her lick,” was her mother’s gentle reproach.
Where increments were fine, where time and space described partitions and gradations, medical science could only trail behind the path of a dying mind. Where this mind did not completely disappear amid synapses and memory stores, it might be called back from its dimly escaped corridors, and tempted to linger and cling to its own reflection in a mirror; should this mirror be uncovered in a house where its body lies in repose.
Liam did not recall anyone else crawling into his cold bed, but realized that he shared this arrangement with his maternal grandfather, who infrequently came to visit the family when they still lived on Renshaw Drive. In these instances where Lester Earl and the grandson bunked together, the source of disturbed sleep was often the patriarch’s bristly chin, whenever he should roll over onto his slighter bed partner. Comprehension of this dynamic was delayed, while the logic of the dreamer issued from a sense of pressure that was not spatially processed.
The grandfather whimpered: This was a pattern of his dreaming where he travelled with a spate of nightmares. The grandson was typically awakened during these episodes and searched his grandfather’s profile for signs of consciousness. This was an understandable expectation since Lester Earl also whimpered whenever he playfully teased the family dog during his stays. This was done furtively to rouse the dog; and were this his present aim, he succeeded in drawing the pet onto the bed.
It snuck toward the headboard to investigate. Liam searched the darkness for the dog’s expression, to see if it, like himself, studied the grandfather’s profile. The dog would not understand what it perceived, whether the noise erupted from the visitor, or from a creature inside the visitor’s mouth. Its ears piqued, so to better process the disturbance, yet with no less worry, it inched away to the bed’s murky footboard.
Liam leapt to his feet, finding neither his grandfather nor family dog in the vicinity. His feet were smaller and more ponderous than in any hour before, and they sent him running across the hall to his mother’s bedroom. There, standing at her bedside, and in much the state that he found himself, was his pleading baby sister. Both children had been chased from their beds by nightmares.
Blythe, who was widowed, frail, but capable, rose to remove a flashlight from her side table and told the two they would be safe tucked in her covers. She did not coddle them, but was prepared to run the ghost off from their rooms.
Disappearing into the hallway, her light beam was seen at first steady, and then fading where it winnowed and became splotchy. Soon the mother’s shadow lost its definable edge and mimicked the closing cuticle of a pillbug.
Lana looked worriedly at her brother. “What if she’s the ghost?”
The brother continued to stare toward the hall, waiting on his mother’s return. The scared child (as he could only be a child where he loved his mother in this deepest sanctum) let minutes past, and his anxiousness came to resemble grief.
Liam was reluctant to leave the warm place and his sister for fear that dark rooms bearing along the hall should not match his recollection. Yet in heading this way, neither the lamp nor the lamp bearer was found. The son supposed his mother was sent to confront the monster hiding in his grandfather’s mouth, or to rouse her father out of a paralyzing nightmare, yet nothing of either scene was realized.
Passing another bedroom doorway, the brothers’ shared bunk bed was spied. If the whimpering was a prank, then the timid searcher need look no further than here to find its architect. He crept to the bedside, but could not determine, from the impenetrable shadow drooping from the ceiling, in which direction his brother faced on the upper bunk—or whether he only pretended to be asleep.
Liam climbed the small wooden ladder bracketed to the bedstead, and on hearing the first tread wheeze under his foot, decided against laying his ear to his brother’s formless head. The boy had no wish to submit to his peculiar crowded sleep.
Whistling staves of a curtain-less window urged him further down the hallway. Its gray light issued from a wall opposite another bed. A formal suit of women’s clothes, draped over a padded hanger, lay across the counterpane.
Though the hoary moonlight limited his color perception, the poly cotton blended fabric was imagined to be a vibrant yellow shade of green. The air immediately over the jacket imparted nothing of April, however. Chill and stiffness in the garment was consistent with its removal from a car trunk in the dead of February. Narrowness in the tailoring compelled a search of the coat pockets where a church program was folded in one and a wad of perfumed tissue was folded in the other.
Concern drove the child from the bed to the window.
An unpaved alleyway lay parallel to the rear of the property. It was unquestionably an amalgamation of childhood residences of short and long duration, though specifically an early one where the young boy contemplated dread associated with an unbounded path and any danger arising from venturing close to it.
Muddy ruts here were superficially those of an underdeveloped rural town, but where these tracks stretched away from his vantage, they deepened to form trenches of doubtful purpose.
Did the source of the whimpering reside in this direction? Had his mother gone to uncover the premature grave of a family dog? The son scanned the yard for her, yet could not think how she should remedy his fear.
Daybreak improved on a peak that was before imagined tacked to a kitchen calendar. Christ ascended from a desert plain toward this eminence. His disciples were counseled to walk as near to Him as possible, for to fall out of earshot was to risk clouds of rising dust from His sandals settling on their heads and clothes; and to fall too far behind was to lose sight of the living and stumble into open graves.
Liam listened for where sandals lifted away from the winding path of nightmares in the hedges and divergent places, and steeled his sleepless mind to stay close.
A knock came. A second knock scraped an icy patch of the window against his head; and there, bearing a flashlight, stood a park ranger who gestured the stranded motorist to open the car door.
Copyright © 2008-2024 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.