Dipping into the dark possibilities of autumn’s shadows, he returned home. When paved shoulder became gravel under his bicycle tires, and gravel turned to dirt circling his porch, gloaming placed someone in the fallow field beyond it, under the new star:
A young woman played with a small dog, which was likely a Scottish terrier. Doubtless she saw his holiday house from a distance.
Her appearing in the field was something he anticipated, and it was natural to connect this new neighbor to a general notion of visual restoration in the sunset: something to exercise fatigued cones in his eyes. He dared to venture into the yard and watch her openly from his half of the world, and being unable to determine which direction her silhouette faced, he thought her occasional motionlessness mirrored his.
Wind and its effects died down by bedtime, making unwanted distraction of the quiet. The homesteader never slept in total darkness. The blackness of the landscape was the one thing he never acclimated to in rural life. Blinking Christmas lights comforted him, and functioned like penlights poking into every corner of the old house.
The front door, having no lock, was nightly blocked with a miniature Santa sleigh weighted with holiday cookbooks and magazines; but the wind would not test it that evening.
Having the following day off, Liam rode into town to check his postbox for commission work. A solitary letter sat in the slot and bore the return address of the county nursing home, which is where his aunt resided before passing. The directive concerned collection of personal effects left there. This came as a surprise to the nephew who had lived in the house for a year without any notification.
A receptionist at the facility pointed him to a back office where an orderly materialized at a counter with a lidless box. The contents therein could only be regarded as insignificant: a pair of house slippers and a key ring.
The receiver-of-goods dissembled to hide his bafflement over the bother, and backed away to ponder, belatedly, the orderly’s strange appearance. The young man wore a five o’clock shadow that looked like it was sprayed from an aerosol can. From a distance (and perhaps from a seat in an auditorium) the patchy bronzer might pass for facial hair. Debatably there was some theatrical reason for it. Maybe one of the seniors in the nursing home was having a birthday that day and staff were playing dress up.
While attending to Margaret’s cat in town, a phone call was made to David at the tower to get a status update on overnight developments. The on-duty observer related a change to the bedded couple in 1136.
“The male dummy’s head rested on the right shoulder of the female dummy yesterday, and now his head rests on her left shoulder.”
“It seems a trivial thing to change, if nothing else was changed,” the colleague reacted. “Did Howard write this up?”
“Howard says the guards didn’t stir from their card table at night.”
“Are you saying that the male dummy came to life during the night?”
The resident hypochondriac explained, “Have you heard of ‘Cotard’s Syndrome?’ It’s a psychosis that centers on the belief one is dead, or parts of one’s body are dead, or missing. Sufferers in extreme cases starve to death in this belief. They may exhibit only brief episodes of mobility.”
“Such as (I take it) our comatose friend rising from a sofa once in twenty-four hours to shift mannequins about on a bed?”
“This is devilishly subtle stuff,” stressed the coworker. “So subtle as to make one question one’s sanity. It’s like rearranging a couple of books on an alphabetized shelf, or putting super glue on a toilet seat.”
Liam confessed, “There’s an obsessive-compulsive component in what we do, and maybe one has to be obsessive-compulsive to regard our job as anything but ridiculous.”
The conversation ended with reciprocal words to this effect, and the cat-sitter left the premises.
The carton taken from the nursing home was removed from his bicycle’s basket and placed on the kitchen table after returning to the house; Liam did not regard it again until bedtime.
Keys on the ring were duplicates of those already in his possession, although one—a smaller, robust key—brought to mind a mysterious closet in the attic, for which the current property owner had no key. Taking his hunch up the retractable attic stairs, boxes were pushed away to clear a path to it. The key fit the lock, and in prying open a sticking door, an impossible number of loose bed slats fell away to reveal a regal molded wing beneath them. A life-sized plastic archangel, of quality workmanship, was uncovered in the pile.
Liam considered the strange design of the closet. The decoration, with outstretched wings, fitted its confinement with the agreeableness of a custom-built shipping crate, so much so that the space was unreceptive to anyone other than the odd-shaped figure and its company of bed timbers.
The Christmas adornment was dragged to the attic hatch with the scheme it should be retrofitted with a new lightbulb and extension cord and placed on the edge of the property, incidentally to serve as a signal torch for his new neighbor. This, however, proved an unworkable plan, and was abandoned when the strategist was unable to get the display through the hatch into the hallway below. With extended wings, the puzzle posed by the angel was one of a schooner built inside a bottle: How was the angel ever removed to the attic, unless the house was built around it? When weighed against the peculiar closet, this was not an unreasonable assumption.
The ornamental guardian was left hovering over the hole where, lacking egress, it gazed down the attic ladder authoritatively to bar further entry.
The power went down after midnight, though Liam could not name the hour when he opened his eyes forcibly and equated this exaggerated gesture with being fully awake. His thoughts ran to the windowpane in anticipation of seeing a moving light there. The specious source was not reconciled to rationality or, for that matter, placed irrefutably outside the window. The glow ebbed before reemerging at the next window, and there it appeared to press itself, as if by lamp or fogging breath, to the glass. The glide of its path suggested the tread of a torch bearer unencumbered by the uneven terrain, and by the time he circled the entire house, his intent was, inescapably, to coax the resident to his feet.
Liam opened his eyes (were they not open before) and found himself still in bed and staring at a glass Christmas ornament lying in the center of the connecting doorway. Undoubtedly a ping had roused him after the decoration fell from a low branch of one of his holiday trees. Being spherical, and unbroken, it had rolled into view before stopping.
The quiet on his retiring had been a nuisance, yet now it gained a material dimension. Something in it was prescient and menacing and sucked up the oxygen around his bed like a smothering fire. Whoever had tread outside the house had likely penetrated through the front door—
Colliding with his slippers in the floor, the resident shuffled into the living room in hopes of finding only the front door blown open and a synthetic tree tipped on its stand. The cyanotype hue of a Bethlehem sky glazed the front window, and pointed instead to a circular windup crèche sitting on the coffee table. The Nativity’s cradle had changed its orientation relationally to objects outside its plastic hemisphere, indicating that the clockwork platform had rotated a quarter turn.
To his certain hearing, Liam could not link the tinkling bell that woke him to the dropping Christmas bulb, since the small glass globe would have first landed on a cushioning tree shirt. Indeed, the chime better compared to a lamellophone, and even to the opening notes of a seasonal hymnal. A straight line was drawn from this impression to the musical Nativity display: His dreaming incorporated the idea of unprocessed sound associatively. Yet what—save a gust—had stirred the toy crèche out of its decades-long dormancy?
He looked again to the lightening window. The pane glass was nearly transparent now, yet still mirror enough in its reflection to convey the outline of a penetrating stare. This stare did come from outside the window, or from the listing front door, which had not pushed forward during the night. Rather, it issued from within the dark house, and cleaved the last of the quiescent shadows like a scalpel—
Aging had dulled the rods in the artist’s eyes and retarded their ability to differentiate between shades in low light, yet instinct preserved these distinctions in his peripheral vision, where danger was most likely to originate. To the degree this perception threatened him, it did not overlap or intersect him bodily. Its sensation was comparable to a form of revulsion, as in finding a shriveled, flattened spider in one’s bed covers in the morning. Were he to sketch his impression on paper, nothing in it would suggest anything recognizable. Liam could only liken the outline to the frenetic scribble of a schizophrenic, which both defanged his fear and required a whole new order in his mind for it.
On cue, electricity resuscitated the homestead’s old, clothbound copper wiring; a fleeting displacement of shadows in the hallway proved attributable to strings of twinkling Christmas lights stapled to the wainscot—
Miraculously Michael the Archangel had landed on his feet. The statue faced the startled homeowner like a burglar caught in the act. Only a coronet of tinsel was lost in its plunge from the attic hatch.
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