Lucien arrived home in time to watch Jeopardy with his mother, and made no mention of his misadventure. Apprehensive, he inspected every room in the house after sunset. Every light switch was checked. He wound up lastly in his father’s office; no soundtrack was detected in the phone’s handset when it was pressed to his ear.
Blythe frightened him in the hallway, where her walker snuck up on him with unusual stealth. “Here baby,” she said, “take some of my clorazepate if you’re having trouble sleeping.”
The bottle’s prescription label was blackened out with a fat pen, but the son trusted his mother.
She retired early. Lucien fetched her a wet washcloth before kissing her forehead and tucking her into bed. He did not go to bed immediately but parked in front of the television for an hour. An old Hammer film horror flick featuring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing offered comforting familiarity, and shortly it left him sleepy.
Many years had past since Lucien lived at home, and there was no easy climbing back into these eternally stamped shadows. His mother was heard in the hall fussing in the pantry closet for a towel. “You’re just like your brother sleeping in front of that television,” she quipped sardonically.
He was late composing a response, but Blythe was away through the unlit hall with discomforting speed.
Lucien then remembered driving home that snowy February day when his father died. The live-away son did not know the way to the East Memphis hospital complex, so waited for his brother-in-law to pick him up after an unconscionable delay in ringing his sister.
A light was left on in the den, which appeared peculiarly bleak from the curb. Even in the hospital’s wet parking lot, where the precipitation never got cold enough to form snow, and then in the elevator ride up, where the lift stopped twice to let someone on and off, a tenebrous presence pressed at his shoulder. He glimpsed his father’s jaundiced body on rounding the corner of the room door, and his sister told him, “I think he just died. He was waiting on you.”
An unpleasant odor lingered around the bedside, and breathing it in was the sort of thing to give one nightmares. Something about his father’s body felt interrupted, as if it had abruptly become another artifact in his cluttered home office:
Had Ernie’s provisional ghost been in the family house going through his shoe boxes of filed baseball cards when Lucien drove up the driveway that evening? Had he been sitting in his swivel chair when his son, with suitcase in hand, passed his office doorway? Did he look out his window to watch son and son-in-law drive away down the dark cove?
Lucien drove his mother home from the hospital that night; he had not fully confronted his night blindness until then. Neither spoke, except when directions were required, and this silence followed them through the carport door to take up residence in the house.
It was not this dreadful night but a day or two later, while the son listened to music in his headphones, that he felt a presence most keenly. Lucien had been rocking back and forth in a standing position, consistent with his autistic practice, and trying to shake off his gloom before bed. Feeling himself being stared at, he turned toward the bedroom door and found it fully open to the unlit empty hall.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled to himself—if not at that moment, then later when he thought about it. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
The current moment was rejoined. A half-asleep Lucien climbed out of the den recliner and shuffled past the television, his father’s office, and the bathroom. His fully asleep mother was spied through the doorway parallel to his; she regularly left a light on at her bedside.
This was as much as could be concluded until the retiring son found himself with someone he did not know. Briskness was in the air; a mist clung to leafless branches in a surrounding black-knotted rut of woods. The two men stood on slippery pebbles in the middle of a shallow stream, where water rushed their shoes but did not seep into their soles’ linings. The reason for their stopping here was so the stranger could point out architectural features in different directions that could not be seen from the road. He wore a black cloak that draped his forearms; perhaps he was a dapper Peter Cushing. This fellow had been talking to him plainly, but Lucien knew, in his unease, that he was not paying attention to what was being said.
The stream bed permitted a glimpse of diverging points, though the view down each break in the woods was identical. A dim outline of a castle, or other medieval structure, was seen. Lucien did not know whether he was being told which path to take by this gentleman, or which path to avoid. By then, his caped guide had departed the scene.
Screeching birds made the traveler realize that the television was left on in the front room. The dark gentleman had appeared simply to advise him on the best way to get back to the den and switch it off.
Lucien, awake, reentered the hallway and again saw his mother etched in her lamplight. The thermostat was programmed to drop in the house during evening hours, and she was out from under her covers. Given her heavy sedation, she was difficult to rouse, so the son re-covered her.
His mother’s hours had become erratic with declining health, and though he had switched off the TV before going to bed, she must had gotten up and switched it back on, perhaps for company. She was forever looking out her window curtains for unfamiliar cars creeping down the street at three in the morning. Once she spotted an old Lincoln town car, with heavily tinted windows, casing houses up one side of the cul-de-sac and down the other.
His mother slept with the lights on to deter intruders; but more so to keep tabs on shadows that tracked through her living room, as if they were mud left by one of her thoughtless boys. This would explain why the television woke him, and why his mother was lying outside her covers. She had evolved her own habits in the empty house: The night owl had been on the prowl and putting her ghosts on notice.
These explanations were settled in his mind, but truly Lucien no more felt the hall carpet under his feet than he had felt the babbling brook moments earlier. Glancing again toward his mother’s doorway, the bedskirt framing her bedstead had climbed in height, and carried with it both the bedstead and its occupant out of reach of the deep-hued lampshade. Where before doorways resided at intervals along the dark hallway, curtains now concealed their locations. This heavy drapery was the same skirting that encircled his mother’s bed.
He was dreaming, if he was not dreaming before, and his restless mind needed to join his resting body. His room stood across from his mother’s, yet in pressing his hand into the curtain fold, a hard barrier was met. When this fabric gave way, the outline of a dollhouse, sitting on pedestal, blocked his passage. A set of small illuminated windows faced him.
Lucien peered into each opening to map the interior of a den, where a television set entertained three dolls arranged on a couch. Though the picture on the screen could not be seen from the angle, it was recognizable from the movie soundtrack. It was an old Fifties film titled The Good Humor Man.
The dolls represented his siblings and himself. And the day this scene reenacted was recalled in every detail:
Ernie was home early from work, and appeared in the doorway under the carport bawling. The children never saw their father cry, but listened to him relate a story to their alarmed mother about an electrician who was killed on a job site. He and another man had dragged the electrocuted body from a narrow crawlspace in a house.
Blythe’s reaction to death’s introduction into the family afternoon routine was to start dinner; the clang of pots sounded a knell from the kitchen where the boisterous TV soundtrack permitted it.
The father sat near the children in his recliner, initially with a numb stare and then, gradually, laughing at the old black and white movie. Lucien did not understand this dispensation of grief: How could eyes that watched the antics of Jack Carson be the same eyes that, only an hour before, saw something horrible.
Lucien withdrew from the dollhouse’s window, and looked again over the hallway. A chill blew, as out of the earlier gothic horror movie and into his present logic. Throughout its length and breadth, the autogenous bed-skirting reacted to it—but in one place it did not move.
Here he supplied the disruption to the curtain, and found, again, his father’s office. Diodes on numerous electronic devices glowed like torchlights from across a distant shore. The broad swivel chair might have escaped detection but for a stack of phone books and unorganized papers left in its disused seat.
The moment afforded a scan of the den. The television was turned off, but not the table lamp. His consternation was intensified on seeing the carport door standing wide open to the elements—
Here was the source of the cold air.
An extension cord snaked its way into the house from outside, and was indistinguishable from his mother’s oxygen hose in the dark hall floor. It parted company from this pairing to climb an aluminum ladder set up under the uncovered attic hatch. The ladder’s treads were ice cold due to the item’s removal from the backyard, although the chill was equally likely to have originated from the attic. At first the son thought his father had entered the attic to intercept his wife on the elevated bed, but a power drill (doubtless connected to the extension cord) was soon heard boring holes into a roof timber.
The temperature in the house had dropped far enough to switch on the forced air furnace. This kicked open the access door covering the furnace in the den, which was want to happen. The smell of warming dust, freed from vents and conduits, filled the house; and as Lucien connected comforting childhood memories with this smell, his mind at last rejoined his sleep.
The son wanted only forgiveness in an eternal act of asking for it. It was the forgiveness that bound families to quiet cohabitation and responsibility and, finally, to quietness.
Wrapped in his blankets, the draft continued to needle him. It narrowed its focus on a square inch of forehead. A muffled voice called down through an auger’s hole in his bedroom ceiling: one made years before the family ever set foot in the house. His daddy, with rare occasion to explain himself, stated to anyone in earshot below from the attic, “I’m putting the intercom system back in!”
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.