The Travelers-Back   by m. l. teague   (page 27)

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Chapter One

House of Abiding Mystery

“But you come and keep the monstrosity behind you and completely blot it out, not like a curtain that can lift up here and there. No, it’s as if you had overtaken it the moment the urgent call left my lips. As if you had arrived well ahead of all that might happen and had behind you only your hurrying here, your eternal pathway, the flight of your love.” ~The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke

Liam imagined himself to be a lesser god, holding the world as a continuous thought in his head where he stared out his hole in the rock: Naomi, as Virgin Mary, was radiantly backlit and presided over the suppliant children arrayed around her on the stage.

Owing to his diligence, the creature suspended from the rafters did not pass unnoticed. It was tempting to believe it a fellow classmate donning angel attire and hanging from a harness, but nothing like this was recalled from rehearsal.

This being could not be seen directly within his narrow view, but loomed as a diffuse mass in the sidewall of his eye. The surface of its body may have been pilose, or this impression may have owed to rapid gyrations, such as displayed by a bumble bee circling a patch of petals on a dusky flower.

Its edges soon dispersed, for Liam could not explain them no better. These shadows did not extend forward but receded like a shoreline. The boy first though himself looking into canals of conduit buried in the ceiling, but this flow of detail reversed course and poured through a sluice, where finer insectile granulations penetrated his imagination.

The nightmare hardened on contact with the improving light. Wherever its eyes resided, they locked on his pinhole—and with the machinations of a predator who confronts prey in an open field. It did not swoop down from its perch. Instead, spindly legs, like retractable stilts, unfolded beneath it. These clacked along the wooden auditorium floor in the way of a rod for one who is sightless. Nothing in this action acknowledged the seated attendees’ heartbeats below, or their rustling mimeographed programs.

The invader preferred the center aisle and, like scaffolding with a single mind, crab-walked its way toward the stage where Bruce Channings delivered the closing monologue.

Liam hoped he would be spared the massacre if he remained motionless under his Christmas boulder costume. A proverbial pin could have been heard to drop, but only the final cadence of the narrator hung in the air.

After what seemed a sensible wait, the actor poked out from under his hiding place. Everyone had left, or had been eaten. He examined the empty stage warily, and felt that this was, strangely, not one stage but two. Perhaps he had experienced oxygen deprivation in his burrow, but he was certain of his impression. These stages either abutted, or one was inside the other. Regardless, this second stage was intended as a disguise. In shedding his costume, a second costume presented itself.

Surely he was also eaten, yet was somehow swallowed whole, with little disruption, into the stomach of a whale. And yet, his surroundings—fire extinguishers, pendant cables, exit signs—bore the scabrous decoration of a spider’s trapdoor; and this suggested something that had not happened yet…

Liam charged off the stage and through a double door exit known to him from school fire drills. The sky outside was overcast with a dim but prevalent December light. The end of the Christmas Play meant winter break had begun and he was getting a late start. Before dashing home, his coat was fetched from the cloakroom, and also his set of Dayglo tossing rings from the school gift exchange table.

Scene: It was in the blessed time before his mother started working. Blythe was seen in the kitchen window moiling over her fragrant pots. The gravy smell of Swiss steak seeped out of a stovepipe and left the son with an hour or two of daylight to skip his plastic rings off the shingled roof.

His hands were stiff from the chill, yet he ran from the front yard to the backyard to gather the toys where they landed among dead leaves along the fence. With snotty nose and inexplicable anticipation, his play was repeated from the opposite side of the house.

The boy would never know his joy to be more complete than this day, although he was aware of some insidious intrusion on it. The roof’s pitch incrementally grew steeper as its overall surface area increased. This required greater effort on his part to clear the peak with each throw. Greater exertion meant less stability and control in his aim so, one by one, the plastic rings got into places he could not reach. When the last one, the summer hue of banana taffy, veered in a gust, he glanced toward his mother in the window. She had lost inches off her height. Debatably the exterior wall followed the roof in its ascent, but this explanation seemed incomplete, even to a child, since the top of his mother’s head was suddenly grayer and bobbing feebly above the windowsill.

A pang grabbed across the son’s chest, but he was still thinking like a child when he ran in pursuit of the toy; it had landed over a hedgerow in a neighbor’s backyard.

His mother was at the backdoor calling for him. She was restored to her abler self, although not enough time had lapsed for her to walk from the kitchen and catch him. Did two versions of his mother suddenly inhabit his home?

The son dashed across the cracked patio slab without another thought to it, yet stopped short of the screen door on sensing an object above him moving contrarily to the dragging cloud cover.

Framed by skulking branches of a sweetgum tree, the monster had followed him home from school over busy Memphis streets. It stared back from its tear in the sky, and had collected the tossing rings and wore them like epaulets.

The boy seized the occasion to study his pursuer: It looked less like a man than a black beetle, or a sarcophagus cover with the relief of a human face carved into it. Liam was strangely not scared, and wanted to barter with the demiurge for the return of the toys. However, it was the neglect (or wisdom) of a child to leave his play behind so it could be re-imagined in the fullness of time.

Bounding into the house, its forgotten warmth pricked his cheeks. Father had already removed the extra table leaves from the attic and set it aside in the entryway, while Lucien, having beaten his brother home, crossed off the last school day before Christmas on the calendar.

Liam removed his coat to the closet. A large envelope was in one of its pockets. His mother was the addressee, and the handwriting in this address was his. This was no report card, and the son had no memory of making a Christmas card for her at school. Regardless, he knew that her receiving it was important.

A dog trotted up to his leg and brushed his pant’s cuff. It was quickly blurring against the couch skirt, and then darting behind an end table. The receiver of this affection could not recall which family poodle this was, as there had been two at different times. He glanced between the wall and couch in passing and saw tufts of whitish, champagne fur. The table lamp reached into this narrow gap, and did not shrink from a prospect of absolute stillness. Cobwebs and dust bunnies were arranged, as by methodical dissolution, to create a burial shroud over the long-deceased pet.

His mother moved in the kitchen, only now seen by way of a reflection in the darkening glass carport door. The wood door partnered to it had been left open during the afternoon to draw off warmth from the winter sun, but advancing night made the barrier polished and cold. In it, Blythe, stooping, fumbled troublingly over an oven mitt she dropped in the floor. Her perceived vulnerability sent the worried son around the corner separating them, but again she was restored in the bright kitchen light.

The son held forth the envelope formerly in his coat pocket; it was still icy cold from its time outside. Since the son had no recollection about what the card commemorated, he could only step around his uncertainty by placing the item in his mother’s apron pocket. In her busyness, she did not see him do this, and Liam returned to the den.

He landed in his chair opposite his brother at the dinner table, the one facing away from the picture window. The creature encountered in the tree was assumed to lurk close by in a bush, but the boy’s quandary over its location was interrupted when his father asked him, “How do you plan to eat your meal wearing that costume?”

The son looked up, confused.

Lucien was less charitable. “You look like a moron.”

Liam rose, feeling weight shift over his head like more objects being removed from the attic. He navigated the darkening house and came to the bathroom. The light over the medicine cabinet mirror was flipped on.

The papier mâché monstrosity covering his head bore little resemblance to a face beyond a bare necessity of holes. Rough peaks rose in places over the forehead and temples where hurried, disinterested fingers smashed down dripping strips of paper and paste to finish the project. This was likely something made in school for crafts, and was the sort of thing for which the boy had little patience or interest. He recoiled to see himself so exposed, and with so little artfulness as to his appearance. From where did the notion spring that his whole body was shielded from public view? And by a boulder costume supposedly left behind on the school stage floor?

The adult eyes staring back at him were also not accurately recalled, but he had been falling backward through a haunted world from the beginning.

He looked to his hands, which still belonged to the child. With desiccated creases and fingernails caked with powdery mud, they were still numb from prolonged outdoor play.

By his encumbrance, he sought to understand how the deception lay. First one orifice was covered, and then another; and as each hole entailed a sense, the removal of one sense intensified the responsiveness of the others.

Lastly the searcher turned on detection of a light flickering outside the bathroom window: A house across from the backyard fence also succumbed to early winter darkness, and there, moving from window to window in this dwelling, the son’s younger, industrious mother was glimpsed. Many more windows were counted than could have existed in true memory, and with each successive pane, a blind, or curtain, diminished a portion of it. Finally the windows themselves shrank, and the figure passing beneath the glass was reduced to a patch of chemical color, like the last few dissolving frames of an aged movie reel. Everything in view was subsumed by a brownish tint, except for this neighboring house’s corner window, which retained its full dimensions.

With crimson drapes drawn, his mother’s arrival to this point was anticipated, but one second became several, and the imposing formality of this bedroom’s four-poster bed was late to make its singular impression: This bed was not intended for sleeping.

The son thought these chambered distortions in his vision were due to the layers of gessoed newspaper, so peeled them away from his head with the aid of the bathroom’s running tap. With his peripheral view restored, he remained unconvinced that he had successfully freed himself from the mask’s virulent influence.

On dropping the last dripping clump into the wastebasket, it was less cause of an orderly unravelling than something unnatural in the pulp itself. The sensation reminded him unpleasantly of clutching a handful of leaves from a bush and finding, wriggling and sticky between his fingers, the gummy chrysalis of a plump moth stitched in them.

This frightful grouping was fled, and Liam returned to the den. Justifying his haste in arriving there, he saw dinner dishes cleared from the table. His mother and siblings were not present, but his father was talking to him, and seemed to have started this conversation before the son appeared in the room.

He was anxious about whatever his father had said, and was about to ask him to repeat his instructions when the doorbell rang; the two turned to face a closed door. This insubstantial wood frame door led to the living room, yet somehow the doorbell was now situated on the other side of it, which meant that the exterior room had disappeared.

In that moment Ernie left the room, but not through the disputed door. The son would not, in his father’s leave-taking, submit to the bell’s summons, and withdrew down the same hallway from which he had presently emerged. The sounding bell did not follow him into the toasty circumambience of the small house, to where the rumbling furnace closet stood guard over the bedroom he shared with his brother.

Liam reclined on the lower deck of their bunk bed, yet did not seek comfort in it. All the bedding under him was sown together, and the embroidered stitch used was too coarse and stiff to fade invisibly into a background of sleep. The mattress was similarly intrusive, and judged to be made of either cardboard or plywood. A question arose about its structural integrity should he take to it too casually.

Were he to examine closely other details of the bedroom, the chest might not have a backing to it, and the closet might lack clothes and shoes to carry him through a week. Rooms and other corridors, in some way forward on this frontier, possessed both benign and hemorrhagic aspects. Descriptions of them might begin with amalgamations of recollections, but would end where his memory was not his own, and where outsized interiors assembled and willed themselves: Floorboards smelled of compost, while other aromatics suggested elemental iron and clay.

Minutes passed blearily, and when one of the family’s little dogs appeared at the half-shut bedroom door, it thumped the bedrail with its muzzle and studded, tinkling collar.

Liam identified the creature by its dark coat as a current specimen—it was very much alive. The querulous Shih Tzu came close to his bed and whimpered. When this failed to elicit a reaction, she paced back and forth along the bed and gave an impatient, clipped bark. Deirdre wished to be let outside, but the son, in thinking about the compromised layout of the house, was not sure whether the yard outside was fully fenced. Any security vouchsafed by a child’s drowsy intellect was a porous, unreliable thing.

Occasionally the pleading, pitiful dog disappeared in frustration, and the son knew it went in search of his mother. Should the pet not find Blythe sleeping under this roof, it would better know where to look for her.

The son was left counting between Deirdre’s bedside performances, and estimated she travelled a greater distance each time in her search. When her patter at last faded, the child feared he left it too late to follow her.

The bed cracked beneath him, yet to get off of it would either destroy or damage it. This sleep, he realized, had chosen him. It was a commensurate sleep, shared like a cenotaph and sympathetic response. It was, as Schopenhauer described it, “A morsel robbed from death.”

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