It was early winter. The house’s windows drew little warmth from the sun in a cloudless sky, although the dwelling was bereft of whatever goodwill occupied it prior to the family member inheriting it. Built-in appliances and a sleeping bag were among the few items left him; and where there were no tables, he nonetheless had possessions to set on tables owing to his collection of still-life objects. Lamps, gourds, and bowls of plastic grapes served as setups when the occasional instructor taught drawing at the community college, and removal of these pieces from the house, even temporarily, intensified its emptiness.
The current resident never bothered to investigate either the basement or attic because that would require buying new light bulbs. It was possible he might find furnishings in these areas, which might, should he pursue their reinstallation, baffle drafts in rooms, but the inhabitant was universally unadventurous in these directions.
The bare house’s most devious feature was a room-to-room intercom system. Each wall-mounted station was in two pieces: a microphone and a speaker married by a short coiled cord. Confusingly, the microphone was bracketed to the wall while the speaker hung from the cord below it, which was the opposite of a practical installation
Usage of this device was theoretical since Liam lived alone. Volume for these units was an ongoing problem because of a lack of controls. There were also no on-off switches. Resultantly, the hissing intercom was inescapable in any room. It was moreover super-sensitive to every noise, which it enthusiastically amplified. There remained the option of cutting the cord to one (or all) of the individual units, yet the resident was paranoid about disturbing the received state of the house, even though he heard things throughout the day and night in the audible network he could not explain.
Any disturbance would be reliably relayed where the speaker at one station would be picked up by the microphone of another, and so on. This feedback loop was comparable to a pebble first rolling down a slope, and then becoming a boulder crashing down a canyon.
The worst of these intrusions was nothing so loud. It was the occasional whimper of an animal, which was assuredly a meowing cat since Liam never found this creature, and could only imagine it kept to either the attic or basement where he did not venture. (Presumably these out-of-the-way locations were also equipped with intercoms.) A dog, it was reasoned, was a social animal, and would be disinclined to favor either of these locations.
His aunt may have owned a cat, or a feral cat may have taken ownership of her. Yet the nephew could not figure out the need of an intercom system for an elderly spinster who lived by herself, other than it enabled her to keep tabs on the pet should it become distressed. She may have been hard of hearing, and communicated with the creature by this novel means (although felines are notorious for ignoring human summons beyond the sound of a can opener).
The seeker periodically called out to the seeming stray, though, in doing so, heard his own voice reverberate mechanically throughout the house like an unhelpful yelling assistant. The cat never answered—or at least was never heard to respond. Like a specter, it mostly preferred to restrict its vocalizations to evening hours and after bed.
Given his hyper-vigilance, deep sleep was elusive for the sleeper. Its existence was chiefly deduced when he awoke with a start during it, presumably due to intercom disturbances. Similarly, he had few dreams that did not incorporate the vexatious contraption in some capacity.
As per the doctor’s instructions, Liam supplemented his sleep drugs with a fatty meal. Hard breaks were experienced at the end of each REM cycle, which facilitated retention of perspicuous dream details. When time again joined him, it came in a rush, though its prescience may have been hours in the making. The sleeper’s unflagging consciousness typically corrupted his dreams, but in this present instance it wandered out of earshot for much of a forming narrative and, effectively, enhanced the dream’s involuntary realism.
His thoughts seldom ventured far from his sleeping body, or toured more than the few rooms audibly defined in their dimensions by the intercom. There were other doorways further ahead, but these were poor in description. He was generally unable to cross into these undreamt spaces because, over his shoulder, and from wherever he stood, he saw himself asleep on the floor, so was chained to this companion. The dream walker could no more close this schism than he could sever it cleanly. Yet on this evening he had done one or the other, though could not say which:
The intercom fell silent, and the next sound Liam heard was his voice struggling to call for his mother. The son, when he lived at home, often slept on the uncomfortable living room couch when company came to visit. Its cushions were coarse, and his body was longer than the couch’s length. Presently he faced the back of the couch, which blunted his cry.
He was aware of the dark living room behind him, where memory placed a low coffee table, two end tables, and two sofa chairs. No family members were roused by his distress because, whatever approached dissolved any notion of other rooms and, consequently, their occupants.
The son was acutely aware of his abandonment, but soon warmth was felt on the back of his neck where a small family dog nestled against him. The terror did not disturb the pet, which slept peacefully in the face of an undefended foe. This calm migrated to Liam’s body, and he did not awake fully until daybreak.
Howard Meade had put the part-time instructor onto a job opportunity, which was temporary work cataloging and packing wares of a mannequin manufacturing plant that had gone out of business six months earlier. Holiday-themed figures were the house specialty, although some of the acreage was set aside to fabricate cement dinosaurs of turgid proportions. These were cast in sections and subsequently assembled on site, although what chiefly occupied Building B, beyond these identifiable parts, were best described as “failed experiments.”
The current employers were not the defunct manufacturers but North Koreans, who bought the property and busily dismantled it; the original machinery was to be left on premises. Where conversations flowed over thermos coffee and bear claw pastries in the employee break room, these new employers were judged to be secretive. While sealed boxes were heading out one door, none as yet arrived to be unpacked. Eight-foot spools of bubble plastic unraveled everywhere at cross-purpose over the emptying factory floor.
After work, Howard drove his coworker home by way of a detour. Both men were made apprehensive by affairs at the plant, and twice over in Liam’s case since he had no idea where his friend intended to take him.
They drove south on a gravel road that paralleled the highway connecting the industrial park to points east and north. Two radio towers converged here, although a driver might be forgiven for thinking only one was seen from the highway. The taller tower was further away, and by chance alignment the smaller tower obscured it. Its existence would never be supposed unless the postulator got out of his car and walked thirty yards into an adjacent field to separate the visual structures spatially.
On entering this triangulation of mysteries, Howard began, conversationally, to recount a dream from the previous evening. “Did you ever play the game ‘Telephone’ as a child?”
Liam recalled the rules. “Where one kid whispers a sentence in another kid’s ear, and that kid repeats the whisper in the next kid’s ear, and so on, until the last kid states the sentence out loud, and the sentence is compared in faithfulness to the original?”
The friend signed off on this understanding and began his story. “In my dream, I am seated in a chair in a long corridor where other people are similarly seated. There is some distance between each chair; dim light complicates an estimate of their number. Once a person receives the whisper, he or she rises and walks toward the next person in line to share the information. The object of their communication is to relay a message to me, and I suspect that those individuals furthest from me are long dead. The last person cups my ear, and I concentrate on what is whispered to me, but make no sense of it. The message has been corrupted en route, but not so corrupted that the words lack emotional impact.”
“From my experience,” Liam appraised, “the Telephone Game, or Chinese Whispers, never worked out. Some jerk-off kid in the middle of the chain was always substituting words, or replacing the sentence entirely.”
Howard responded, “Subjective reports are unreliable—true. But something survives of the truth. A leg may be kicked out from under a stool, and still it stands. Mitochondria have been removed from a cell in some instances, yet still it behaves as a ‘living’ cell.”
Something similar occurs in my dreams,” observed the other, “but the messenger coming to me is no one capable of conversation. It is usually one of several family dogs from my childhood. The pet arrives at my bedside and scratches the bedrail, or whimpers in an attempt to rouse me.”
The native highlighted this peculiar feature. “Dreams are nothing if not endless, unburdened exposition, in which a plot need never be developed or resolved. The dreaming brain has no problem with this. A newborn baby spends nine hours a day in REM sleep. By the age of five, this is down to two hours. What does a baby, with no experience of this world, have to dream about?”
“At some point your dreams run out of fresh material,” Liam cautioned. “You begin to recycle themes and characters. I find that I dream increasingly about the act of being asleep, and in a particular location. It is often the last house I shared with my parents, which had a poorly constructed patio shed attached to it. This structure was open to the elements, with simple wire screens and a fiberglass covering. I spent a lot of time out there building wood stretchers for paintings, so this activity, and the open-air nature of the place, are folded together. Everyone in the family is bedded down under this patio.
The boundary between it and the proper house is blurred. Through the labor of my father and myself, the patio has been extended to incorporate the backyard. Each bed is like the branch of a monkey puzzle tree where, in being elevated and cocooned in fiberglass, it dissuades ground-dwelling predators. Something lies out therein the dark, and there is no door securing the patio. I can never figure out whether this nightmare is mine alone, or is shared between family members as a form of purgatory.”
Howard ventured, “Perhaps, in building stretchers for your paintings, you were reenacting the labors of your ancestors who lived in round houses and trench-lined boroughs. These shelters and defenses required constant maintenance. One slept uneasily in The Iron Age. You had no idea that you were emulating the industry of your forbearers through your desire to be an artist.”
Liam was on the point of expanding this topic when a regional landmark, of dark reputation, erupted over the eastern horizon. It lay within a few miles of the private cemetery, though its desuetude state might similarly attract coimetrophiles and off-terrain vehicles. Switchgrass covered a field rising toward it, upon which a light snow was added. The buttery color of late afternoon light highlighted blue-violet shadows, and also a bleak pinnacle.
A mood preceded the travelers to this place, though, properly, it belonged to the native guide in better-illuminated hours. He pulled off the road and switched off his truck’s ignition.
The painter was no more exploratory of the neighborhood than he was in his house, yet could see this remote outpost from his east-facing front window most days. “I’ve always assumed a whole house occupies this prominence,” he declared.
Howard corrected the impression. “Branches of the cottonwood allow a fair amount of light through on a bright day, creating meshes and shaded shapes. In being paired with the turreted tower, the brain supplies windows and clapboards.”
Liam could not see why the dilapidated structure should be an object of interest, although the failing light perhaps addressed the timing of their expedition. He quietly capitulated to his friend’s itinerary and followed him on foot up from the road.
Presently they realized the point of their visit; Howard stepped forward to seize the high ground. The footprint of the former house was traceable, though its lumber was salvaged many decades before. Broken stonework remained and, inescapably, a four-story tower.
An entrance to it lay on the shadow side of a winter afternoon, and though it was darkened, it was not obstructed. Liam merely peered into the ruin while the guide panned his penlight over wooden steps that showed little deterioration. A crimson velvet stair runner was in place with all its brass stair rods securely anchored. Balustrade and balusters were also intact, and none of their fine floral carvings, which evoked Arts and Crafts motifs, was cracked or rotted. One could only marvel at it, and assumed that the exterior wall spared the interior much, if not all, of the savage wind that cut everything in the vicinity down to stump.
Howard led the way with his meager light, and in coming to the upper room, vanishing sunlight from a window revealed a stack of encircling floorboards. He explained, “My prankster friends and I, some years ago, formed a stationary battalion along the stair path to pass these planks up one of a time.”
The lumber appeared to be original to the house, yet what was most striking in this aggregation was a substantial exterior door leaning against the pile. In its ornamentation it matched carvings from the staircase.
Liam observed, skeptically, “It is odd that these boards have not been hauled away in all this time. And more so that door.”
“I cannot explain how the door came to be here,” answered Howard simply. “It was not here when we perpetrated our prank.”
This was of immediate interest to the artist, who approached the pile with an outstretched hand.
Howard interfered with his friend’s action. “I do not know what this means,” he confessed with mild alarm.
Liam puzzled over this reaction. This scene, more than the improbable fact of the intact tower itself, was the apparent point of the visit.
He had been put out to this juncture in their proceedings, yet was moved to relate, “When I was a child, I received a magic lantern one Christmas. Its point was to project cartoon images of Yogi Bear onto unsparing white walls; I exhausted its entertainment value quickly. I tried it out in different rooms of our small duplex, and even took it into the dark closet to increase its theatrical effect. The industry of those hours, and my ensuing boredom, never left me as an impression. For much of my life I thought that episode was about the cartoon imagery, or my attraction to bright colors, but truly it was more about the starkness of my family’s meager rental dwelling, and how the projected images intensified something hidden in it. The experience was purely perceptual, devoid of emotion or distraction—yet it was somehow more reality than day-to-day reality. I can explain it no better.”
Howard, who favored such topics, mused quizzically, “Does any interpretation of the universe suffer particularly from its answer being set so far back in a landscape to escape perfect scrutiny? Objectivity is never within arm’s reach, leaving one to wonder if reality was designed with no other goal in mind. The only difference between the paranormal and quantum physics is that the latter is able to predict accurately behind which door the boogeyman will appear.” With this epilogue, he turned to the stairs and added, “It is well to hear (and not see) what ravages this landscape. It is no less momentous than the retreating ice glacier that carved up these lands.”
The guide appeared genuinely spooked, and was determined to leave. He retreated down the steps unhurriedly, but also without delay. In passing through the disintegrating doorway below, he underscored, by detection of his pocket light, the manifest differences between the two states of preservation.
Time was spared for a wider survey of the grounds. Nothing was found to match the enigma of the turret until the men rejoined their snowy prints leading up the slope.
“I see only one set of tracks heading to the tower where there should be two,” Liam complained nervously.
“The wind is hard along the northern approach,” ventured the scout. “It erased the outlying set of tracks.”
The friend could not remember if Howard walked on his left or right side coming up the hill. Regardless, the remaining set of footprints were also eroding. No discernible shoe tread was left to identify the hiker or the direction of his heading. A stranger coming on these vanishing tracks might assign them to either a badger or fox.
The guide stopped short of a descent, and stared momentarily toward the plant where both men worked, which was now little more than a brownish shadow rubbed out along the horizon. “Have you ever noticed,” he began incidentally, “that a crematorium abuts the mannequin factory? Or perhaps it is better to say the two structures are conjoined.”
Liam’s gaze also sharpened over the cinderblock chimney, which towered ominously over the distant complex. “I have never thought to ponder the point of that smokestack,” he admitted, “or its connection to the manufacture of mannequins. Do you imagine there is where they sent the rejects?”
Neither man, to that moment, felt the biting chill so keenly. The lagging tourist matched his friend’s wary glances at the stand of trees. Branches appeared to multiple in the rapid dusk. Eastwardly a railroad truss bridge was known to cross an icy brook. It emerged from alluvium and hill country, and through a ravine regionally famous for producing fossil remains of fleshing-eating dinosaurs.
The visitors anticipated a speedy departure from the area.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.