Liam’s amorphous interest was not expected to appear in the field that evening because sunset had come and gone. Regardless, a new order existed between the neighbors. Forlorn stares across a bereaved landscape would no longer satisfy. He could not help but wonder where she dwelled when she was not a notion in his head. Did she choose to become hidden, so to watch him from the screen of a shelterwood?
A wintery sun approached from an opposite shore, and its ecliptic set it on a course out of alignment with the mysterious weathervane. Eva’s half of the world would soon again resemble a secretive sea.
With nightfall, the homesteader wandered his rooms with a mopey cast. Emotions were things not easily vented, and so his body stored them up and mislabeled them as ailments. Given his mood and apprehension, some little occupation was found before retiring to palliate these ailments’ worst effects.
The silence around his bed was oceanic, and somewhere in his pursuit of shuteye he tracked the meandering edge of his pillowcase. Chiming Christmas lights steadily brightened over his walls, and presently a peeling sliver of paint threw off a shunted shadow of mountainous proportions. Knowing his imagination would torture him as long as night held sway over the landscape, the sleeper sought better mooring in his bedcovers, but was interrupted when a second shadow, offsetting the first, fell over the fireplace grate in the next room.
How long Eva had been in the living room was unknown, but her covert arrival, like her departure the previous evening, coincided with a power outage. Had his Christmas lights blinked from the wall in that moment, they might have served as a repository for her bruises, but she preferred to remain a shadow, and some ways still morphing out of his provisional consciousness.
The discomposed host rummaged through a cabinet of teapots. Daybreak was hours away, but the winnowed beauty refocused his energies. She gestured toward the cracked door with a plan.
“Let’s go for a drive.”
A blue Buick LeSabre was parked a quarter mile up the road, and was instrumental in his speedy removal from the house. Liam, out of his depth, contemplated the rare perspective with distance: His holiday shrine darkened to a cinder, and the pounding wind conceivably found no substance in its notion where it found no erodible attribute.
Eva drove them into town, and given the hour, this was arguably the only time she would dare be seen with him. They parked near the old municipal theatre and walked through its open doors without discussion.
Liam had believed the turn-of-the-century auditorium desuetude, but plush fabrics, visible through an interior set of doors, covered the walls. Period furniture for an Edwardian drawing room occupied the stage. The grand drape was drawn to reveal a surprising degree of mechanics in the fly loft. This reticulated array of pulleys and rigs suggested a child’s game of cat’s cradle, though its raisons d’être appeared to center on a squarish box behind a gauzy scrim curtain toward the rear stage wall.
Individuals stood in the darkened aisles halfway to the footlights, but they were not members of a dispersing audience. Many were in some preparation of costume dress, and were presumably involved with a production, though their roles were not clear. The troupe may have been so small that every actor lent a hand readying things for a performance. Or maybe, in this instance, they assisted in its dismantling.
All looked to the shining stage where other men marshaled pendant cables. The gauge of these cords was substantial enough to be seen from the cheap seats, yet each points d’appui was needed to harness the cantankerous machinery. Intricacy of this order was liable to tangle where care was not utmost in the minds of those charged with its handling.
Occasionally in these calibrations, the workmen stopped and glanced at their associates in the aisles. If instructions were being offered, they came through nods since little was seen of individual faces in the poor light.
Another hoist initiated a dance of thronging wires. Panels of the silhouetted box behind the scumbled curtain fell away as noiselessly as petals plucked from a black tulip. The outline of a crouching figure was laid bare.
This automaton (as it was no living being) responded positively to the whipping gears. It rose without the hesitancy imposed by long slumber, and its projected shadow tripled in size, seeming to overtake the translucent drape and penetrate it. By appearance, the outline was suspended in the celluloid of an x-ray, though its murkiness reminded Liam of a septic gauze. He was unable to account for his discomfort in probing this form until it lurched. This action too was mechanical, whereupon the automaton began gliding across the stage floor parallel to the curtain that concealed it.
A tuxedoed master of ceremonies jumped into view from offstage and threw his hands over his head, gesticulating unintelligibly—a hiss of steam preceded a halt in the pantomime. He prompted a stagehand (perhaps a machinist) to retrieve a replacement wheel. This fellow produced the machine part and jogged behind the scrim curtain with urgency. Visually it was only a matter of feet to reach the robotic form, but once the man became a shadow on the far side of the sheer fabric, he traveled (or appeared to travel) an unanticipated distance. By comparison to his rapidly diminishing scale, the automaton grew to enormity. Loud ratcheting of a socket wrench was next heard, though the exaggerated action against the drape did not marry perfectly to it. This clatter originated offstage from a Foley table of sound effects, indicating that the interruption was part of the performance. Once the defected wheel was replaced, the man tasked with repairs reemerged with an ‘all clear’ and the operation recommenced.
The contraption moved more silently from one side of the partition curtain to the other, in the manner of a doll wheeled along on a well-oiled cart. Its profile was unflaggingly squared to the drape, and when it disappeared on either side of the stage, the viewer did not see it turn but supposed it simply to reverse polarity, as if molecules along the leading edge of its body migrated to the opposite side to retrace exact steps. Eerily the ghostly figure left the impression it did not exist in the corners, although its ectoplasmic veil, like a trailing mane, remained in sight. The fine filament of magnetized wires flowed into the fly loft with afferent purpose, to either discharge volts of electricity or draw power off a grid.
When the machine at last stopped center stage, the billowing curtain briefly enlarged and lent a third dimension to its drama. This aspect was nearly as horrifying as the pageantry that preceded it, since a fourth wall was broken and suggested a prowler crawling through a window and into the Edwardian drawing room. What had been proportional in outline was now grossly malformed under the undulating cloth, as if the draped barrier corrected for distortions of foreshortening. This final effect was not yet fully absorbed when the stage floor opened and the spectacle fell into a silent pit with the suddenness of a marionette cut free of its strings. With equal (if unnatural) rapidity, the whipping curtain resumed its rigid form with no further turbulence.
By now the acting troupe and master of ceremonies had melted into the shadows of the theatre, and the sense of abandonment was complete.
The shaken witness to these proceedings could not see how the display was in any regard safe or efficacious for a public performance. Nor could he picture the automaton, with its regalia of un-insulated wires, following behind a fire truck or marching band in a parade. It was reminiscent of a thrashing machine seen at a state fair, but nothing in its operation suggested agriculture, the 4-H club, or Future Farmers of America.
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