Lunch and dinner were not forthcoming. Daylight narrowed to a pencil, which meant the sun had dropped through the shallow winter sky to disappear behind a copse. In its failing, a tint of apple peel filled the upstairs. A lambent sky conspired with the late formation of clouds to rush in a prescient dusk. The fog had evaporated in the previous hour, although its peculiar opacity was taken up without a break by ensuing night.
The bed in the room opposite still possessed a box spring, if not a mattress, but the prisoner believed it should be tolerable.
Waxing shadows saturated every wall in the room, and though they were no longer seen to move, movement of a kind stirred within them. The house was nonetheless silent where the manufactured storm had yet to sound.
The first disturbance issued from outside the house. Liam rose from his unrested sleep and dashed to the bay window; An untucked flannel shirt identified the moonlit individual standing below him as Howard.
The gladdened captive fled downstairs, but his liberator never materialized at the front door. Nor did he venture to the north side of the property and the rear door.
An absence of motion light on the stairs convinced Liam that he dreamt the episode, so he returned upstairs—Howard was still seen against the bramble below the bay window.
“Force the front door!” his friend urged.
It was not clear if the intended rescuer received this communication, but he tracked toward the front of the house. His inciter returned downstairs, where again he did not meet with the motion light.
Heavy footsteps were heard under the portico; Liam exclaimed, “Force the door!”
A boom and loud crack followed—but the wrong door was breached.
“The other door! The other door!” implored the prisoner.
No response came, but faint disembodied footsteps sounded from the walls. Turning back toward the stairs, Liam saw where the motion light over them had activated. No one—save a ghost—would have passed him.
He toured the downstairs. The light patch on the dining room wall blinked where someone intercepted its source, yet he could not say if this interception occurred in the dining room or in the hidden room.
He shouted his friend’s name into the hole, but this produced no response.
The prisoner retreated to the room opposite his original bedroom, where a boxspring (but no mattress) offered begrudging accommodation. He reclined on this makeshift field cot.
As the quiet in the house extended, squeaks and moans persisted from the upstairs hallway. Fretting over these noises provided excuse to remain vigilant, even while regions within his mind succumbed to the normal architecture of sleep. He re-envisioned the hidden house as comparable to these divisions…
A waiting room was visible through the French doors of an examination room, but the dreamer preferred the exit favored earlier by the doctor. Only a corridor communicating with a empty lobby was ceded, which was shared with a connecting hospital.
Utility lighting, of cost-saving necessity, made for murky, mop-swabbed corners and piss-yellow hospital walls. It did little to illuminate an oil painting hanging next to copper-plated elevator doors. The dark opening of a cave was depicted in this picture, and also a sizable, displaced boulder. This suggested The Resurrection. Stylistically, the rock face reminded him of Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, in that it looked more invented than observed, where sienna tones poured over foam-sculpted shapes of theatrical lightness.
An enormous clock occupied the center of a plaster frieze over this decoration, though in lacking the support of dedicated floods, the hour and minute hands inattentively lagged in the early morning shade. Human figures, attired in togas and flowing cloaks, moved in profile across this frieze, yet these characters could not be coordinated with either the themed painting or the mission of the hospital. Perhaps they were early Christians inhabiting a purgatory for those asleep in Christ: wanderers into his dream realm who, in profile, did not meet his gaze but looked steadfastly to places of their ascension.
A duffle bag sat in the floor below this procession, alongside a row of fiberglass-molded chairs of mid-century design. A cast-metal vending machine with a change slot and robust pull levers completed this idea.
Liam, hungry, fished in his pocket for change. Among bits of lint, three quarters were found. These were fed into the vending machine, whereupon a sleeve of cheddar cheese crackers dropped from the slot—
These were a ruin of stale dust.
The diner’s attention returned to the duffle bag. Perhaps the item’s owner stepped outside for a smoke.
A large plate glass window was approached in search of this individual, but no exterior lamp aided the searcher. The panes were as impenetrable as the painting’s rock crevice.
Presently something calloused struck one of the windows; Liam lurched away. The slab of glass shuddered in its loose caulked trough, but nothing of what hit it lingered close by. A second strike occurred, and the distressed man was convinced that this attacker bore talons. Yet with the third blow, feebleness was apprehended in the assault. A fourth charge revealed no clawed fiend but, instead, a bird’s beak.
Liam looked to the white linoleum floor in front of the chairs, thinking this attacker was a determined owl that, shrouded in midnight, repeatedly dive-bombed the window in pursuit of a mouse seen in the lobby. In finding no scurrying rodent underfoot, the searcher’s comprehension of the action was nevertheless improving. The fifth strike was categorically that of a bird, but without frantic, repelling wings to make it a living creature. This was no avian invasion. These birds were dead before meeting the obstacle of plate glass. They were being—one at a time—thrown.
The witness realized that this was an attempt at communication. He glanced again at the unzipped duffle bag, where several inky decoys of crows were heaped together inside. Their discoverer mumbled, “Howard…?”
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