The houseguest could not say whether it was the semblance of a storm or punctual scratching at the door that compelled his flirtation with consciousness. The distant quality of the summons was folded into his blanket with nonchalance until a thump occurred close to the bed.
Squinting edgewise across the desk, Howard’s flashlight, or rather its absence, roused him. His foot struck the asset in the floor, from which he concluded that an uneven table surface (and not an intruder) facilitated its relocation.
The flashlight would be better stored in the desk, so in switching it on to find the pull, the drawer readily slid forward. He anticipated the sliver of pink chalk from his previous examination, but not a strange dark spot lying in the bottom of the wooden tray. This discoloration was believed to be mold, but in pressing his light into the center of the drawer, the deposit, about the circumference of a demitasse saucer, dislodged itself and skittered over the tray’s edge before vanishing.
A slender shape grazed his cheek—he swatted at it, thinking it a length of cobweb caught on the rear leg of a flying moth. The lurching group trailed off toward folds in the heavy drape over the window, which parted for it to pass.
Liam had no confidence in this determination since shapes in dark rooms were hard to distinguish. His brain was prone to interpret situations by “filling in the blanks,” where doubt was left.
Moreover, bringing his light to this curtain supplied no rational explanation for what he witnessed. His conviction about it being an insect, or two or more coupled insects, was unsupportable: Only a bat or bird possessed sufficient mass to disturb curtains and crawl behind them.
Something again touched his ear and neck; he shivered, recoiled, and flung his torchlight widthwise across the bed. The elongated shadow passed oppositely toward the set of curtains on the north wall, where fabric panels again separated. Whatever charged him kept to the curtains, and through its disruption of folds suggested either a skulking predator or the baseboard vent of a forced air furnace.
The draft-like character of this movement however, persuaded him of a third possibility. Reaching into the curtain part, his hand met with a hole in the wall. Air gushed from this opening, though it was not a chill that made him shudder: The dark rupture was identical in size and shape to what was seen in the drawer.
Liam would not plunge fingers into his discovery for fear of rabies or tetanus, so returned to his bedside and stashed the flashlight in the desk.
The moon was nearly full in the window curtains, and jostling the panels threw a new order of shadow over the floorboards. He was startled to see his shadow leap across the floor beside the bedstead. The prospect of him happening on this moment of the night, and seeing one shadow (his) aspire to reproduce contours drawn for another, was too much like happening on the chalk line drawn around a corpse removed from a crime scene. The two outlines had conjoined but for a minute, and Liam could not make his shadow again match the bedside drawing. It was not that the moon had moved out of alignment in so short a time but, surely, that the chalk outline had moved.
Impulsively, his pajama shirt sleeve was used to wipe away the drawing, and he returned to his coverlet. The mattress edge blocked view of this unsettling business in the floor, as did a fresh layer of ointment in his eyes. Watch was kept over the sinister drapery, but it was more in the way listening for rustling among the heavy panels. The fabric remained a still composition, despite material evidence of a draft. Its serenity was of such a convincing character that the watcher believed it had never once, in his presence, stirred.
The thought of an invader was not eradicated from is mind, but any menace attached to this apparition faded when a hand—and not a claw—nudged his shoulder. Shock sent the sleeper scrambling to the unbounded side of the mattress, but he was in no second left in doubt. He stared sternly at the outline of his friend and complained, “What do you call yourself doing coming on me like a burglar?”
Howard bore a flashlight.
“Is that the flashlight you gave me?” charged the roused sleeper.
“It was lying on the desk.”
Liam was on the point of refuting this claim when his visitor caviled, “I don’t know why you sent me to your house. Your aunt told me that she was there watching over it.”
“My aunt…? My aunt is deceased.”
The friend reiterated, “An elderly woman sent me away with assurances.”
“This ‘elderly woman’ who met you at the door, did she smell of spirit gum?”
“I stood on the porch and never entered the house. The prevailing wind did not favor discoveries of that type.”
Liam groaned with disappointment. “You know better than the county coroner that my aunt is dead. You have fallen prey to an impersonator in a house dress. Doubtless this was the person you spied in my attic last night. You did not return there, as I instructed, to run him off.”
This criticism did not ruffle the agent. His preference for providing answers was selective. “It is easy to imagine people continue to move over distances,” he proposed, “and engage in the activities of their daily lives where one has lived out of sight of them for a time. To remove the distant family member under these conditions is only a temporary intellectual interruption, as the one who lives away from home invariably restores the loved one to this location. The difference between the deceased individual and the living individual comes down to technicality, since the contemplation of them, for the accustomed contemplator, is not materially changed.”
This strange exposition provoked Liam. His friend spared him a reply when he turned to the door and announced, “You had better follow me.”
The follower rubbed his eyes clear and acquiesced, bumbling to his feet. He stepped into the blackest hallway imaginable. Resurgent wind placed weather on a fast westwardly approach, and though the next clap was irrefutably louder, the listener was not certain it was true thunder. A glimmer reached across the bay window, but given its limited penetration, it more resembled embers flung from a campfire log than lightning. Nothing in it was relatable to a storm. Whatever prospect the weather monopolized, it did not lie in this direction.
Howard’s torchlight glinted off a mirrored panel door unlatched on the armoire. A draft issued from the door behind the blocking cabinet; the selfsame door was open. The substantial piece of furniture had been budged from its spot, perhaps violently. The aiding light dipped to the floor beneath its squatty legs and revealed several splintery boreholes where screws were ripped from their fasteners.
“Did you force this cabinet?” inquired Liam.
His friend was already through the doorway.
The space behind the wardrobe was now accessible. It did not communicate with a seventh bedroom but with cramped stairs, which led to the turret that the guest had supposed to be walled off from the first floor. Diffuse moonlight anchored these narrow sinistrorse steps in place, although the risers jutted steeply into a higher bank of shadow, as if into overhanging trees branches.
Footfalls within the tower barely wedded to the pair’s tentative intrusion. In vain the listener contrived to make the number of steps tally to their own, but each stride produced an echo, which ably doubled a distance.
The darkness above them waxed and waned in a way suggesting the obstruction of a blowing curtain, but when Liam again looked up from their progress, this shadow had pushed down onto lower treads with intelligence. It imparted its glacial character to the increasingly reluctant climber. This torpefied state in his extremities did not extend to his eyes, which darted between prospects of suffocation, such as imagined in a narrow wood casket, and vertigo. Liam preferred the steps immediately in front of him to these other considerations.
Birds’ nests came into view as the men neared the top. The chill meant no glass covered the upper window. This must have been a state of affairs some years for birds to claim these ledges confidently. Truly the barrel-shaped stairwell resembled a wind turbine, yet where the roaring sound could be divorced from nervous imagination, it produced no physical effect on the detritus littering their path. A window shutter somewhere outside the house banged on its hinges, but this calamity too could not be coordinated to the whirl in the climber’s ear.
The moon, on whatever trajectory propelled it under clouds outside, convulsed and lurched backwards, taking with it what little transparency it lent the stairs. By the time his guide’s torchlight connected to the last step, the miasma had reabsorbed back into the parent shadow. Presently the two stared through a straiten door that the companion could only regard with less suspense. Effects of the sibilating weather lay across its face, and placing his hand on the stile intensified its peculiar character.
The pane-less, upper window was seen; puzzlingly, it did not possess curtains or leaping lightning. Howard entered first, and when Liam shoved harder on the barrier door, it shoved back. His sense of paralysis was absolute, but brief. No one grabbed at them from the other side, and a second’s caution assured him no one would.
The flashlight revealed the extent of a deception. Outlines emerged on two elevated platforms above their heads circling the turret’s pinnacle; noisemaking contraptions occupied these shelves. They bore the design of theatrical Foleys that, when synchronized together, manufactured sounds of a fierce storm.
The flashlight could barely make these machines intelligible, yet each was linked to a pretense: One apparatus appeared to be an aeoliphone, whose belt-driven drum produced the whooshing sound of wind. Its coconspirator was composed of pneumatic vices, which flexed the long flexible blade of a timber saw. The resulting quaver approximated thunder. Crackling lightning (or its clamor) erupted in concert from the roof timbers, where crashing trashcan lids were tied up with nylon fishing line.
Liam could not imagine how these orchestrated effects were funneled down into the rest of the house, or by what means they were amplified.
“This is for your consumption,” intoned his guide gravely. “Look…”
Impossible logistics was more the bailiwick of the native than of the nonnative, and in casting his gaze from the window ledge, Liam sought refuge in murky treetops, which were closer to him than the ground. The companions were not so high that, by a less claustrophobic means at arriving at the view, he would have been afflicted with the same degree of timidity.
Howard did not wish to share the immediate landscape with him. A spy scope lay across the same ledge, and in being handed it, Liam was instructed to gaze in the direction of the homestead three miles away.
“You know of my visual difficulty,” complained the friend. “I am unlikely to see much of anything with ointment in my eyes.”
And yet—the scope’s optical strength surprised the observer. The slightest movement of his head, however, threw the view down the tube wildly out of range of familiar landmarks. His sights jumped from sward to trees and back, settling imprecisely on miles of countryside.
The outline of a window in his aunt’s house slowly formed. A powerful lantern was needed to span the not inconsequential distance. Exaggerated shadows floated throughout the otherwise modest dwelling. This theatrical aspect suggested not a sharp light but a diffuse one, such as made by candle flame, or as limited to the glowing cloth wick of a kerosene lamp. Whatever combustible fed this wand, it tossed its shadows to and fro to instigate a disquieted charade of ombres chinoises.
The observer proposed, “My patron searches my house for secrets while I am away. Secrets he believes I have unearthed at the theatre. Preparations made in this house are unquestionably intended to cover his tracks to and from my house.”
Howard gave no reply, in anticipation of more to be discovered.
Faltering perception conspired to make shadows in the scope resemble things. It was tempting to believe that voids in the turreted house called to others in the neighborhood. A substantial conflagration, in any case, was needed to evoke any sense of movement at three miles. A fire raging in curtains intolerably came to mind, though the height and breadth of what was envisioned better compared to a broad sail. Arguably ripples roiled in this material, and also a violent, incendiary wind striving to tear it apart.
Liam was on the point of urging a return to his aunt’s house to deal with the possible fire, but paralysis again seized him.
A cataclysmic event was next pictured: something so colossal in scale, and embedded in so remote a past, that any movement associated with it must be rendered imperceptible. The vivid outlines of planetary nebula came to mind, where radiated gas and dust expand at inconceivable speeds.
These distortion he perceived would be (no more, no less) than the twinkling of a star: an effect that would owe more to light being conveyed a vast distance than to any actual celestial attribute; and how close could a sentient being come to these forces and not be dissolved by them?
Liam was a prisoner to this obnubilation, and suspected that the hypnotic effect was confined to the scope itself. He rubbed his eyes to clear any obstruction, and everything witnessed to that moment disintegrated. Looking through the scope again, the window of his aunt’s house was found without difficulty, but a shadow, possessing a sharper edge, stepped in front of it, as if the snuff out the light.
A black as black as this was impossible for his present vision to produce. Necessarily, he attached wariness to this person who emerged into the exact focal range of the non-adjustable scope. This man, with arms raised over his head, waved excitedly. He wore long sleeves of an untucked shirt.
The observer first thought this a taunt, and then a warning. The idea of Howard being the signaler barged into his brain, despite his friend standing beside him. The dark figure was instantly lost in the scope and could not be recovered.
No beacon was visible on the horizon with an unaided eye, though below the window ledge, and more readily discerned in moonlight, a path cut through an intervening field. It was dull and dewy where trodden grass was stripped of its reflectivity. Their maker may have been an animal swerving low through the rough, or maybe his midnight visitor was responsible for them.
Glancing down at Howard’s pants legs, no moisture was seen around its cuffs; although his friend was missing a shoe.
“Where’s your other shoe?” Liam asked.
“It’s a trifling thing to lose.”
This plaintive response led to a closer examination: Howard’s complexion was sallow, perhaps from trekking across a windy, cold field. Patches of variegated skin were also detected. These jaundice tints excited dormant cones in Liam’s eyes, and the pain perceived in these injuries jumped the small distance separating the men and intensified the ache in Liam’s wounded wrist.
With the torchlight momentarily aimed away from the percipient effects of the cramped room, the racket made by the Foleys, at least to an uncritical ear, was believable as a true storm. When the torchlight swung back over these machines, their pretense again degenerated into ridiculousness.
The door to the upper turret squeaked and played into these theatrics. Its movement was not due to anyone bursting in on them but, instead, to a genuine draft. An oversized garment bag hung over the back of the door and worked like a counter-weighted pendulum.
Liam did not recall seeing the bulky item when they entered, apart from pushback on the door, but the shadow effects met on the stairs conceivably emanated from it. The fabric possessed odd, stiffened dimensions, like a tent or unpractical kite. The examiner was drawn to it for this reason, and uncovered coarse hairs snagged in its unfastened zipper. These exuded a static charge on contact, like magnetized filings sorting themselves under the toucher’s recoiling fingertips. This sensation compared unfavorably to stroking a tarantula in its burrow.
Having waded into this dense material without scruple, dust started at him and billowed when he lurched backwards. “What costume occupies this bag?” he inquired sharply. “Does my patron intend to frighten me?”
“The best action is to do nothing for the time being,” reasoned Howard. “I will keep you informed of what I learn, and if your patron intends harm, we will anticipate it. Give no cause for suspicion.”
With these instructions, the visitor stepped around his friend’s dilemma and through the door. He descended the heteroclitic stairs more rapidly than he had climbed them, despite the hindrance of wearing only one shoe.
By the time Liam reached the ruptured doorway below,, nothing of his friend, or his torch, was seen. The straggler was left to re-imagine the remaining steps in darkness. “Leave the flashlight in the bedroom!” he called out impatiently.
His delay in reaching the hall meant enough time lapsed for his confidant to disappear by the central staircase. And yet, the tread of his steps punctuated the claps of thunder. Another devilish Foley was pictured at work: one employing a conveyor belt to feed a supply of shoes into a chute. This was not an active chase but a methodical closing of tandem steps: one sharp and clangorous and the other dull.
The temporary occupant did not pursue his questions as far as the staircase. He was in no mind to test the motion light, even in view of this friend’s protracted style of leave taking.
The flashlight had been returned to the table, and was cradled among the paperbacks in the same position it was left initially that evening. Why this bothered Liam could be chalked up to knowing his friend too well: Howard was not one for squaring objects with table corners.
The situation was reevaluated in view of the hour and his exhaustion and, wisely, the bathroom light was turned on to maintain a wedge into parlous consciousness. Little argument was needed to convince the lodger that someone other than himself slept under his bed covers, for in turning them down, he did not think himself so long away from the bedding that it should still retain its warmth. Regardless, for what sleep was had that evening, it was spread thinly.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.