Paralysis afflicted him—but was it the paralysis of sleep?
His sense was one of being wrapped in a thick fabric, or animal hides.
More to his dilemma, his body was being carried on a tour through the dark interior of the house—and over more floorboards than were believed to support the upstairs rooms.
He nevertheless comprehended his situation: A cadre of men bore him along. By appearances, all, small in stature, were part of an elaborate costume that trailed away in a black, tortuous heap. Yet what animal—four-legged or upright—was this assemblage meant to represent? And for what purpose did the masquerade serve?
Consistent with a hurried design, a peephole was made for him to see out. This feature placed him under a large headpiece, which made him the centerpiece of the pageantry. The mirrored armoire was nowhere nearby to judge the costume’s horridness, but it was perceived as a nightmare.
Arms and legs occasionally swung into his narrow line of sight; yet it was presumptuous to label these as appendages. Liam could not say what manner of things they were, only that diminutive men occupied and animated them in the manner of a Chinese parade dragon. How these fellow imposters attached themselves to the larger disparate anatomy, or to himself, was unclear. Little sense could be made of the elaborate pretense or its gestalt.
This speculation did not persist as entertainment, however.
Sodium Chloride ointment, which still coated his eyes, contributed to a lack of individuation in his peripheral vision. Where he tried to spy his journeymen and their shared misery, they writhed like blow flies from within the disintegrating carcass. The more he thought about these extraneous regions, the more they twisted in the dark veil like seeking knives that pierced his sides.
Benefit was gained by concentrating on the small hole in front of him, through which he sucked in his measly air current. His influence over the costume extended to visual perception and muscular movements of the eyes: This ability, when paired to his paralysis, suggested the architecture of REM sleep.
The company came to a halt, and the prisoner was left in no doubt about where they arrived: His one eye hole now aligned with the puncture made around the downstairs light switch plate. Here, at last, light was forthcoming, if only from the mysterious source.
A stabbing shadow came to block a portion of this light, and if the buzzing in Liam’s ear was not due to exposed electrical wires, owing to his butter knife having accidentally sliced into sheath earlier that day, then the sound indicated the presence of a large flittering insect. Lulls in the action convinced the listener that this was a bumbling beetle settling on a stud out of exhaustion, and then ricocheting futilely between two sheets of drywall.
Liam worried over this winged pest getting into the costume and becoming a nuisance. He was also concerned about what manner of disturbance compelled this insect forward through the interstice. Was the costume merely a bluff to scare off what occupied this inaccessible area? Anxiety attached to anything coming at him from this direction.
His panicky hand materialized at his side, having wiggled up out of ill-defined darkness. Wisely (or unwisely) fingers replaced his eye over the hole. Another sensation came with a rush of air, at first thought to be this bug, covered with pilose hairs, crawling up his knuckle. Before the awfulness of its invasion registered, the slight contact become clasping fingers, and then a warm, tender grip slipping away.
Liam withdrew his hand immediately. His eye again hovered over the hole and traced the shadow of the invader complete—not by enlisting the crack in the door frame but by the aid of the mysterious door itself, which separated from the dark wall. The light streaming through this opening was profuse and absorbed the figure passing through it.
His cataleptic paralysis was broken. The dreamer launched away from his morass of pillows to glare at the bedroom door, which had come unlatched where gravity and an unleveled floor aided its momentum.
Removing his flashlight from the desk, he entered the hallway and puzzled over his outline among the intractable shadows. His light beam tilted with the mirrored glass of the armoire, and seemingly reached into another wing of the house of equal size or greater.
His midnight visitors were un-trackable in this direction.
The bay window was impervious to any suggestion of daybreak. Moreover, darkness outside the house proved shallow and counterfeit, and married to its counterpart shadow within the house in a way that was more like the night thought quit in the half-hour before.
The stairs were not hazarded. Liam refreshed his eye ointment, returned to bed, and tucked the flashlight under his pillow. With his hand at the ready on its switch, his ordeal was not neatly resigned. He did not wish to match the crisp-edged impression left in the bed, or reproduce its shape of sleep faithfully.
The installed guest was out of his métier in weighing this new evidence, and could not fathom his spate of ghosts: whether they conspired against him or were malingerers beholden to another world and its vanities.
When next the sleeper awoke, he was certain a cry from the hallway roused him, with the word “breakfast” among the chosen words. This bellow likely came from the dumbwaiter. With his bedclothes shifted about him, he tumbled to the door to peer, with less tumbling, out. In previewing the meal on the tray, he declared he had no appetite.
Sunrise brought proportion back into the world, as improbable proportion it was judged. The flashlight was still in his possession, so was replaced inside the desk. Its bearer tested the sliding drawer more than once to see if it would disappear but, indicating either a favorable or unfavorable development, it did not.
During this experimentation, the calendar page in the same drawer was reexamined. The black spot was now missing from the illustration. The tray bottom was searched for the scabrous deposit, but unsuccessfully.
Had the creature concealed within the picture sprouted legs? Had his nightmare exorcized it?
Familiar landmarks were sought outside the west-facing windows, but a dense fog had formed in the night to engulf the house; this haze replaced the Vaseline glaze removed from his eyes. Nothing of the field was seen for this bank of cloud, and only buckthorn bushes scuffing the house’s clapboards yielded to outline.
He continued downstairs, and had not completed his descent when more incongruity greeted him. The first floor of the house was significantly dimmer than the second floor. Moreover, the front door appeared, against material possibility, to have moved during the night, shifting some feet rightward beneath the pediment ornamenting it.
In view of his claustrophobic nightmare, he feared he may had been narcotically immobilized, wrapped in a carpet, and carried off by couriers to a different house. Yet was this house a reverse-transcription of the one in which he was contractually installed? Might this explain his disorientation where he kept turning left while his internal compass bade him right?
Dread preceded him to the front door—it was locked; the backdoor also reflected this new state of affairs. Calmly he yanked the bell pull and summoned the stuffed model from its hiding place; something in the terrier’s appearance was also changed. It was not in lighting or placement but in aspect. Somehow the left and right sides of the corpse traded sides, or so he was prepared to believe. The portrait painting on the easel likewise reflected this queer, subtle change.
With the hearth exposed, the searcher groped a pocket in the brickwork fitfully. Handfuls of soot fell away, but the base of operation was inaccessible.
“Hello!” he yelled into the opening.
The elevator in this wall reacted. This sent him charging up the stairs and throwing open the dumbwaiter, but his warden had removed the tray of uneaten food. In frustration, the captive returned downstairs to see where the dog, of its interrupted timetable, re-entombed itself in the fireplace.
A wing chair was grabbed with unreserved rage, but the grabber’s intention, which was to smash a window, was thwarted—his action sent him cringing with spasmodic pain in his wrist.
Curtains were torn from windows in a fury—plywood boards now covered the panes. This was more evidence of a different house.
A search was made of bureau drawers for a screwdriver or hammer, but Liam found only coasters—enough to furnish two Victorian houses.
His vain effort was surrendered, and the dining room was toured. The glowing patch of light on the wall was unchanged, although the chalk circle no longer matched its position.
Examining the parlor wall bearing the fireplace, Liam knocked on it at calculated distances to ascertain whether any place within the structure was compromised or hollow. This activity had him recalling knocks heard during his first day of residence—and too the booming “hello” that issued from the flue. These events had not been someone attempting communication with him, but rather the desperate reenactments of a doppelgänger—or future self—realizing his imprisonment!
Such wild speculation was too much like tempting an annihilation of matter and antimatter, so Liam wisely withdrew to the easel chair.
He could not resign himself to the unfinished portrait commission, yet imagined his double studiously painting from an identical easel in a parallel parlor. More to his defeat, he could not help but view the tools before him as foreign and contaminated; but surely these were his thumb indentations in the paint tubes.
The painting sitting on the easel was the last thing to be regarded. The pecked-over frozen TV dinners in the foyer closet came to mind where he searched the method behind the furrowed strokes of his canvas. A sickly, dispossessed feeling sent him fleeing the parlor—and not the idea that this was another canvas entirely!
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