The nephew washed his face in an act of ablution that morning. While removing saline ointment from his eyes, he sought absolution for an ill-defined transgression. Whatever he thought he saw the night before would have been viewed through a Vaseline glaze. He convinced himself that everything, including the gauzy cobweb, was the product of a dream.
Over slices of whole-wheat toast, he resolved to replace the chest to the hall, though in peering up at the attic hatch, he realized how the formidable object’s previous position had interfered with its retractable steps.
His aunt went into the nursing home because she broke her hip after falling from these stairs, and died within the year without returning to the house. Given she was unable to reach the jewelry box on top of the chest due to her frailty and stature, it was impossible that she should pull down the attic door from its short chain and deploy the ladder successfully: The pull had hovered a good seven inches above the trinket box. Moreover, the aunt would have been incapable of moving the heavy chest under the hatch, so perhaps someone was enlisted to relocate the item to the hall since the homeowner had no further use for the attic.
Why this had not occurred to Liam before was curious, though what was more curious was that he had used this blockage of furniture as an excuse to never investigate the upper part of the house.
The spring-loaded platform yanked down with a single heave, bringing down a hail of dust that circled like a cat’s bristling tail. No light switch for the attic was in place on the hall wall, and when the climber ascended the ladder in search of one, a slatted step gave with a sharp crack. Liam barely escaped a tumble, and wisely returned to the floor to assess an injured wrist.
Both the collapsible stairs and the replacement of the chest were left for later.
He judged his injury to be a sprang, which made bicycling difficult, although peddling was not so arduous on the outskirts of town. Having checked his postbox, he traveled past the county hospital. A walk-in clinic was attached to the far end of it, but the minor nature of his complaint persuaded him to forgo a visit.
Perchance the sun pierced the hospital’s windows that hour of the late morning, and strangely someone was seen standing behind each imbued pane of glass. All had their backs turned to the viewer. With necks like tallow candles, they resembled sightless sentinels.
It was inconceivable that the establishment should employ so many nurses, or that every patient should have a morning visitor. It was more likely that these were the primary occupants of these rooms, and their liberty to roam about owed to the facility being a hospital for psychiatric disorders and not one of physical debility. The speculator could not imagine what assortment of disorders should have patients enacting the same robotic behavior simultaneously, unless these were not patients at all but store window dummies whose appearance of occupancy, no matter how wooden and unconvincing, was to lure unsuspecting victims into the building.
A cloud crept over the roof while the cyclist peddled away. Its scalloped edge encroached on his path. Each head in each pellucid portal shrank away under this shadow’s advancement. The eerie effect was likened to a murmuration of purple martins feeding in twilit.
Liam judged a private burial ground to lay halfway between the Otis elevator plant and the hydroelectric dam. An imposing angel of white marble stood at the eastern end of a handful of plots, and its placement at the summit was either to encourage mourners to hazard the grade or, like a Greek caryatid whose raised arm forbade entrance to a tomb, to shoo them off. In summer, sunflowers softened the austerity of the approach, but never the wind in any season.
When a Canadian gust prevailed, and geese were migrating, one heard the testing elevators over shorter prairie grasses to the North; and this was what Liam thought he heard most days. The assembly plant was a bellwether, and when its aluminum girdle buckled in a gale, the crackle, like lightning, was distinguishable from the low rumble of elevators in its demonstration tower. The plaintive tune gained a layer of encryption in the meadowland, and sometimes resembled loquacious conversation at night.
His stop here was principally to spare his wounded arm before the final push home. The vantage point afforded not only a view of the beacon atop the Otis tower, but also the tracking lights across the spine of the hydroelectric dam, which formed an opposite shore.
Given the slight stature of those living in the Nineteenth century, the rows of grave markers around him were situated narrowly, and when the chatter of wind withdrew from these close quarters, a musical fragment was discerned within it. This fragment disappeared through bars of the iron gate, though its point of origination did not lie with the plant but with the dam.
A dip in temperature was felt when a turkey vulture passed between the sun and his bicycle on the declivity past the marble pinnacle. Chill lingered in the rider’s blood. The prehistoric shadow swept ahead of him on the rural road and excited a prey animal instinct. No sack lunch was packed in his knapsack to merit this attention, and surely his wrist injury put him in no mortal peril. A duck head umbrella lay across his basket, and doubtless the carnivore confused it for a meal.
Portent was not as readily reconciled to logic, despite it being mostly downhill to the dam. Gloom jumped from cloud to cloud and colored each, and before the distance was realized, the cyclist caught up with the malefic melody.
Turbines roared south of the twenty-foot thick dam wall, but on the north side, the structure’s fortification formed a shallow bowl. An expanse of blowing grass here functioned like a rebounding diaphragm, which explained the ranging, acoustical effect: A dashboard radio blared from the open door of dusty blue car, which—unbelievably—slowly circled within the wide depression.
Liam assumed this to be an afternoon’s entertainment for bored teenagers, but no one was behind the steering wheel. The steep embankment prevented the uninhabited vehicle from climbing out of its track, and so the perpetrators of this clever trick likely hid nearby and had a good laugh.
The automobile had been circling long enough to leave ruts as baneful as any found in The Badlands, although the vital moment connected to its entrainment seemed passed some time: so much time that the drab, weathered interior of the vehicle resembled a sepulcher of dark dusted granite.
The radio was left broadcasting for its wraiths, and the cyclist sped away.
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