Following breakfast the next morning, the painter was more rested than he would have thought, although this imperturbability was upended on finding little concatenation between his memory and its reenactment. How the night proceeded was unclear since he was unable to separate nocturnal movements consigned to dreams from those factually made. Still, his dream logic had ascertained, before waking logic stumbled out of its bedclothes, that the furthest door along the corridor led to the turret. However, the armoire again blocked this entrance, and from his half-hearted nudge he determined that another set of screw holes were driven into the boards to re-secure it.
If this development was intended to edulcorate a mystery, then it did not succeed. Who would make time for this repair? Not Howard, he concluded. Moreover no manhandling of the cabinet had sounded in the predawn—not such as would wake a professed light sleeper.
Returning his breakfast dishes to the dumbwaiter, the chalk drawing was examined beside the bed rail. Though foot traffic eroded its contours, he could not say that one set of feet had belonged to Howard. Moreover, the flashlight on the table had not moved since his last seeing it. No spot lay in the desk drawer. There was, however, a hole was in the north wall, although it was little more than a crack in the drywall.
Setting these incongruities aside, and for want of a better plan, the portraitist worked fervently on the model throughout that morning. No eruptions were forthcoming from the fireplace. His heart had beat throughout a series of brushstrokes, and indicated a lapse of time where little else in the house obliged him in this regard.
After a late lunch, he stepped onto the porch to partake of more widely circulated air. The short day was rounding off its hours, and the red winter sumac was the only detectable color where southernmost shadows seized on a degraded sun and its low track.
Liam could not explain his apprehension other than to attribute it to what he witnessed in the spy scope the night before, and then to those occurrences that attended his travel.
Against these premonitory shapes, the second front door under the portico was tested. It was, unlike the door through which he passed to the porch, locked, but not nailed shut.
It was not strange to suppose this was the cellar entrance. A Victorian house with a cellar door slapped on its façade would not be regarded as unusual on the inhospitable prairie. It was within the practice of neighbors, being few, not to strew the path of passing strangers with primrose gates and welcome mats leading to their stoops. Had the builder installed a moat and thicket bushes, this too would have been seen as a reasonable precaution against whatever stalked these little-used country roads in late afternoon.
Liam was not inclined to return to his painting. Phantom switch plates were inspected, of which the number unconnected to functions inside the house was too great to be accidental. An ear was set against the wall while one of these was flipped and, like the switch in his upstairs bedroom, the click reproduced a spatial quality that seemed to reverberate through an unseen room of approximate size.
A butter knife was taken from the kitchen and used as a screwdriver. One switch plate cover was removed, and the switch box inside was loosened from a stud brace. This obstruction was yanked through as far as wiring permitted and left to dangle, leaving the excavator to chip away enough drywall for a look-in.
The view through a hollow led to a narrow patch of light. It shone through a crack around a poorly installed door frame, although this door frame was as elusive as the light source intimating at its existence. Where curtains offered no impediment, this light did not match the failing light outside. The effulgence conceivably issued from a lamp, but this lamp was unconnected to any wall switch.
The searcher placed the dining room as the source of the light, where no light shone. He began hacking at the wall closest to a point of origin, and it was torturous work given only his uninjured hand could be dedicated to the labor. Another hole, equal to the first, was made.
So much plaster was tossed up in the operation that nothing was seen for airborne particulates. Fingers were plunged into the gash, where air rushed over them. This indicated a throughway to where the light escaped. His gesture was restricted, but his frantic probing endeavored to snag something—if not a visceral presence, then its attention.
Wires within the wall were uninsulated—and yet there had been no shock in carelessly rubbing his skin against them. The switch was either a dummy or the general disrepair of the house had shorted out the circuity.
A loose sheet of card stock suddenly presented itself; this paper was pulled through without difficulty. Confoundedness was in Liam’s expression before he knew why, but in extracting the style and sickly colors, he understood this was no simple illustration but a torn page from a calendar, comparable to the one he received at the hospital that lacked a yellow ink plate. This calendar must have been older—so much older that the color yellow, and its influence, had faded completely: same result, different cause.
Indentations in the paper were consistent with marks left by a busy ink pen, although this engraver’s residuum was long disintegrated. In view of innumerable obfuscating curtains in the same setting, these scribblings, were they mere reenactments, seemed justified where a housebound resident simply recycled the same calendar year after year with no regard to whether a given September date fell on a Sunday or a Monday.
Should Liam’s discovery of the calendar page be claimed as coincidence, then how much more coincidental was it to find the same indistinct snowcapped mountain peak looming in the background of the affixed illustration, where it served, indistinguishable from his samples, as both adumbration and improbable feature?
The foreground image was not readily linkable to The Rapture or an interrupted scene. Nevertheless, it conveyed the same eerie foretoken in being de-peopled. Unexceptional architecture was depicted: a drab, over-shaded two-story apartment building. If not for the mysterious mountain, it would have been dismissed as an advertisement for a rental property. The arrangement of outdoor elements lent no inducement to the miserable building, but the peruser could not toss the page aside lightly.
A corner of the building complex partially eclipsed a dark, low object, which, with squinting through the binocular portion of his eyeglasses, might have been an unruly shrub. This shape faced into a courtyard, and its utterly black character was out of context given the depiction of diffuse light. Vague distress lurked here.
Initially the discoverer of this spot thought this was the desiccated viscera of bug that crawled into the wall and died. Its point of contact with the illustration constituted a contretemps, although this did not explain how the beetle was squished against the card stock paper so thoroughly, as by a ruthless, unremitting thumb.
With his curiosity piqued, the dark patch was attacked with a fingernail, as if it were an ink square on a scratch-off Lotto card. Liam thought it warm in color where nothing else in the picture was. It occurred to him, late, that a roach, and not a beetle, may have supplied this deposit, but this revolting idea was rejected in finding an effluorescent gritty texture. Wiping away this salt, a trace of brownish hue was pulled off: The yellow pigment embedded in this enriched black (made with constituent ink colors) had not faded in any degree.
An illustrator intended this flat, silhouetted outline, and turning over the leaf and reexamining the grid of days hinted at its identity: The month printed in the header was November, which meant the image he held in his hand was for December. These were the two months missing from his original calendar. This shape, he concluded, was a backlit donkey arranged around an unseen manger scene. (The cropping was so unfortunate that his guess could only be regarded as a repair to soften an honest, primal reaction.)
His destruction of private property had occurred so incrementally that no excuse could be offered to Howard should return that evening to scold him. The chink of light emanating from inside the hole had, during this forming moment of regret, remained constant, and seemed unusual by its ability to penetrate the dining room. He feared his activity may have stirred an inchoate presence in this hidden room—if not its shadow.
Before surrendering downstairs to nightfall, the excavator returned upstairs to fetch the sliver of violet chalk from the upstairs desk. It was used to circle the emanation in the dinging room, thereby tracking its movements, should any occur.
The calendar illustration was placed in the desk drawer, and in seeing the image lie there, its black, incongruent shape resembled, in tone and color, the one previously claiming this location. That discoloration was the creation of a nightmare—as was the hole in the north wall to which it bore comparison. Elements were being transmuted into waking realities, though out of different circumstances.
After consuming an apple and sleeve of crackers from his knapsack, Liam recuperated in the hour before bed. His adventurism, either by its duration or mere fact, meant no meal was forthcoming that evening in the dumbwaiter.
He read more from the sanitarium journal, and was amazed how each time he took up its pages, more pages containing pertinent information about the house’s builder were discovered:
“During his career as a mind reader, E. C. Taylor employed a circle of men of small stature. No one knows how these associates were used in his act, or why their slightness of height was indispensable to the execution of their duties. Each man was absorbed into Taylor’s ménage after he retired.
In building a mansion for himself, the mind reader wished to emulate landed gentry of old England who hired hermits to spruce up their gardens and supply their households with atmosphere. If these these Rococo charms and misdirections were in the homeowner’s mind initially, he found other employment for his secretive league of dwarves: During daylight hours these confederates kept to dark corners of the house where Taylor particularly feared attacks originating against him. Central to this paranoia, the estate’s northern face was denied windows, since he believed a general malevolence preferred these prospects.
Taylor’s quest for anonymity outlasted him by producing no official account of his demise. It was averred that he faked his death, took up a nom de guerre, and entered the sanitarium of his founding as a resident patient.
Liam should not have been surprised in finding this information advantageously arranged for his consumption. He even suspected that individual journal pages, showing prior evidence of having been dog-eared, were crimped with the hope that, by means of thumbing, he would favor them.
The reader’s activities of that day, specifically plunging his head into two hastily made holes, led to a persistent irritation in one of his eyes. Dust had gotten into it, and repeated flushing from the bathroom tap only partially alleviated the tenderness.
Between splashes, he thought he heard scratching come early to his bedroom door, although in applying his ear to effects in the hallway, the disturbance was judged to originate with the foyer closet and its noisome sleeping bag. Should the Scottish terrier spring to life within its boarded-off tomb, he reasoned, he would hear its bell. He did not hazard the motion light on the staircase to investigate either scenario.
The wary houseguest turned off the lamp and crawled into bed. Here he entered a desperate hour of speculation, which gradually delivered him to a thin veneer of dreaming, where events of his day overlapped and blended with other concerns before the indefatigable present moment faded.
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