His climb eased at a plateau. Trees here were neither removed by fire nor straight-line winds but by inscrutable industry. Nothing in the simple ashen houses, so presented, would count as unexpected in a clearing, yet their pane-less windows whistled with strange hollow beguile.
Whether the snow had stopped, or was simply barred, was difficult to determine. Unshaded moonlight was enlisted in a survey of the neighborhood.
Nothing in the scattered toys along the projected lot lines indicated children’s play. This was an arrangement of objects. Lawn furniture was also on display, and would not have warranted a second glance except that these elements did not flow together agreeably. They neither faced one another nor circled a patio. Instead, they were lined in rows as one might find them in a yard sale. Garden hoses, barely seen among the shadowed fescue, circumnavigated these locations. Their placement was as haphazard as their abundance was alarming. None were coupled to spigots or sprinklers. They appeared to have been left where they were dragged and dropped. Scattered yard tools—multiple rakes, shovels, and pruning shears—showed a similar obsessive-compulsive tendency in their abandonment.
The most glaring error in the deception lay under carports. No vehicles occupied these spaces: specifically—no fully assembled vehicles. As with the lawn chairs, some attempt was made to keep the car parts orderly and corresponding to their relative position should one envision a completed chassis. It was doubtful that whoever hauled these mufflers, transaxles, and brake pads up the mountain had any use for them, or expertise for how to reassemble them. Every piece of the suburban exhibit was farcical; yet it spoke to intent where a facsimile was hastily erected to convince someone (perhaps reconnaissance aircraft) that this small grouping of houses was inhabited. Such a charade would only succeed at night since daylight would quickly betray incompetence in the layout.
Noise broke over the still—the archaeologist looked around nervously. The creature he followed potentially sought shelter in one of these structures and, in imagining himself to be in the crosshairs of its gaze, the suspected property was approached cautiously. Words to the effect of an incantation were embossed on a doormat:
The business that walketh in darkness.
Whether this was obfuscation, or a kindly warning, the trespasser passed to a window. A bare illuminated light bulb revealed half-finished walls and a dirt floor. The noisemaker was not in direct sight but in a dim connecting room. The bear was something half-formed from a child’s fairy tale. It sat in a creaky chair at a table, where it ate—what was presumed to be—the slice of stolen wedding cake with a fork. Its silhouette bore a human profile, with cheeks that ballooned with pleasure at the meal.
A lack of detail perceived in the shadowy scene was at first terrifying, but it settled into a thought amenable to reason: The trespasser witnessed a purely mechanical action. Fur-wrapped rods and gears masked a man-sized puppet. Every coil and cog seen from this vantage conformed, strategically, to chirality, or handedness; although a handedness ill favored by Nature, as it was judged, in its clockwork to be malignant. And yet, why should the builders of this Potemkin village, who made little effort to convince anyone at close quarters of its genuineness, put painstaking effort into a mechanical attraction that no one should see?
More noise erupted; the form of a second automaton walked in front of another house’s window. This movement was also programmed, but it was an open question whether heavy gauge cables restricted each bear’s activities to the premises. The questioner drew closer to the action but saw nothing of this second automaton from the window ledge. The lit room, regardless, held a trove of answers: The kitchen cabinet doors were here and, too, the table leg, the paper towel dispenser, and countless inconsequential things.
These items removed from town suggested something of a hamstringing intent: They betrayed the preferences of a parasite who picks around the edges of a host organism while leaving its vital organs intact. The host is at first clueless, and then resigned to his or her worsening condition. The Pacuense language of Easter Island coined a term to explain the phenomenon: tingo, which was to borrow objects from a neighbor’s house, one at a time, until nothing remains.
As there were no doors to any of these cottages, the explorer stepped through a rear entrance. Three beds of Brobdingnagian dimensions sat along a dark wall. Two were unoccupied, while a blanket covered someone lying on the third: Was this the instance of Goldilocks stumbling into a strange house, and finding a third bed (now occupied by a monster) most relatable to a child in being the smallest?
Lifting the corner of the blanket, the bear’s smooth face was more human (cadaver-like) than he supposed. Its whitish glass eyes were open, yet were unseeing. A tattered prairie bonnet was tied around its head and matched the gingham dress it wore.
Abruptly a cable alongside the bed convulsed beneath its sheath, triggering a reflex; yet this movement proceeded with the coordination of a puppet whose limbs were pierced with boreholes and wire braids. As these connectors tautened and loosened, the figure gained or lost rigidity under the heap of covers. It appeared, throughout its torso and extremities, to assemble and disassemble itself with each lurch. This aggregation took on an ominous brown shade: a hue matching the lining of blood-flushed eyelids clinched during a nightmare.
This could only be a contrivance of darkness, the onlooker believed, similar to occasions when, as a sleepless child, he lay in bed staring at drapery in moonlight. There he saw a bug crawling up the drawstring repeatedly, like a replaying strip of film. It was the sort of thing the primal brain supplied as an understanding where it reached for understanding. Still, this was an instance where nothing physically advanced on him, although a heartbeat (perhaps his own) closed in like fell footsteps.
The trespasser retreated out the doorway that had tempted him. Possibly he had strayed into an uncompleted theme park or, again, into a snare of misdirection. Perhaps these decoy monsters were meant to keep real monsters away from the hamlet below. The theft of items (or tolerance of theft) hinted at appeasement: Offerings given to a mountain spirit with the same unspoken begrudging as when a blind eye is turned on the disappearance of virgin daughters.
Something insidious was at work here, which did not involve cauldrons of sulfur or unshackled demons but death by a thousand whimsical paper cuts. These fairy tale bears would soon tire of their porridge and cake. With only the stars at their backs, world-weary momentum would propel them down the mountainside. The ending they heralded would be nothing so ostentatious where the improbability of the world was ostentatious enough. Tribulation was, to be sure, a monotonous business, and required a Patient God to disassemble what had been assembled; and by the same means break down each man to rebuild him.
Past where the artist supposed the town to end below, snow and sky blended under the encouragement of a veiled moon. Rooftops hinted, through gray disguise, at shades of an emerald sea.
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