The peculiar aspect of the afternoon stuck with Liam through dinner, and at bedtime influenced a nightmare of greater vividness than its predecessor:
Because Snowflake, the family poodle, suffered from a false pregnancy, she stayed out of company and hidden. The front door was left ajar for her to come and go as she pleased in absence of a controlling authority. A bowl of fresh water was also provided, and several lamps were turned on in forward rooms throughout the evening hours.
Anything outside could get inside, which left the house susceptible to pest invasion. However, the son could not determine whether drumming in the bright lampshades owed to failing lightbulbs or buzzing flies of unusual girth. A dark warbling mass circled under the shade rim of one table lamp, and before it could be identified with certainty, it escaped into what remained of natural light for that hour.
Dismay set Liam arresting the motion of window curtains. No sooner had he stilled the roiling fabric panels at one end of the darkening house than movement erupted in those at the other end. Chill penetrated these rooms but nothing of an outdoor draft was felt.
Presently a pale champagne-colored shape fell away from one drape to become a twisting body on the carpeted floor. At first the son thought Snowflake had banged her head against a windowpane while hunting flying prey, but she was in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
The convulsing dog was cradled in his lap, and several fingers were shoved into her salivating mouth. This was a common practice in those days because (it was believed) that epileptics were capable of swallowing their tongues during fits.
The dog was soon easing, and succumbed to a sleep that was judged to be unwholesome since her eyes remained opened. Whatever vigilance was supposed in them, their stare belonged to the domain of haunted oil portraits.
She was placed on the living room couch and arranged between its twill cushions. This left Liam to take his concerns to his mother in the kitchen.
Cellophane-wrapped comestibles surrounded Blythe on the countertops, where she prepared, with much undertaking, travel snacks. The preparer paused in her labor to remind her son of the horrible day when Snowflake escaped the pet groomers and made her way down busy Summer Avenue. She missed the entrance to Renshaw Drive by one exit and strayed onto Sam Cooper Boulevard. Though the beloved pet succeeded in finding their neighborhood, a vehicle struck and killed her.
The child, smelling powdery talc perfume on his hands, accepted this pet grooming account. However, in looking out the dusky kitchen window, only tick-infested woods lay across the street. This was the intended (though contested) corridor for I-40 through Memphis. When this plan was scrapped, this stretch of completed road became the future boulevard his mother referenced.
Leaving his confusion, Liam returned to the living room briefly to count the number of twill cushions. Three were needed to span the couch, yet four were present.
Another buzzing shadow circled the walls of a furthermost bedroom. A dog emerged from its doorway, and in not being recognized, it passed nonchalantly out of sight. It failed, in due course, to reappear in another doorway. By its look it was a mixed breed, and probably a stray that wandered onto the premises.
Despite this dog’s evacuation of this bedroom, the flittering shadow remained behind. Liam belatedly remembered his bed-bound grandmother occupying this bedroom for a period, yet by these alarming gyrations of light and dark, the grandson did not believe this to be the ailing family member fussing around her bedside lamp. A feeding tube in her stomach restricted her movements. This waxing, waning shadow was likely another fly synchronized to vibrations of a lampshade.
In an excess of caution, the son returned to his mother with a new description of a canine. She identified this one as another deceased pet, Tippy. The yellow dog had belonged to the grandmother, and was a favorite companion of the grandson when he was an infant.
The two were often paired together on a blanket in a backyard, which they shared with gnats, grass seed, and an unshaded sun. Tippy was always panting, and carried the odor of outdoors, but never indoors. Why, then, was the dog allowed to come and go as it pleased? Was this to accommodate the ailing grandmother?
The son made no more inquiries about the mortality of pets, or about his grandmother: whether she was sick or had returned from traveling extensively. His ability to navigate twilit rooms and pose questions grew increasingly difficult.
His brother was seen playing with a board game in the dining room, which, as a room, provided a throughway from the kitchen to the living room. The dimmer switch for the overhead chandelier illuminated at half its capacity, and concentrated the general unease that originated from opposite ends of the house.
Lucien, who sat at the dinner table, bemoaned the loss of game pieces. Liam could not say which game occupied him. Because the box was stored vertically on an upper shelf in the nearby coat closet, pieces had evidently fallen out of it.
The sibling stiffly held up a cardholder, upon which characters magically formed through a narrow slit of transparent red film. These were grouped syllabilically, but the intruder on the game would not be drawn into its proceedings by pronouncing the word they formed.
This cardholder was a component of the Password game, which included no game pieces. Undoubtedly pieces of another board game (probably Sorry) had been improperly stored in the box, prompting Lucien to divine rules for a game by which cardholders and plastic figures worked together.
He spoke aloud the proper name beneath the tinted film: Lazarus.
Jesus had delayed seeing his dying friend, and when He arrived after the burial, several days later, Martha, Lazarus’ sister, was distressed. Jesus reminded her that no man was dead who believed in Him. Though He wept with the mourners, He did not cry for the loss of a friend but, rather, for His intrusion into Paradise to recover and restore Lazarus to a lesser world for the sake of others. Heavy with sorrow, Jesus ordered the stone to be rolled away, and found Lazarus wrapped in burial clothes.
What had Christ seen in the black tomb, and how far down was it into Death where worlds separated?
The next word to appear in Lucien’s cardholder was Fontaine.
Here the local legend of a city founder gave report of a death, where the namesake body was temporarily laid over a dining table in anticipation of the arrival of a coroner. Minutes later the allegedly deceased man bolted upright on the table and exclaimed, “I died and went to Hell! Bring me a glass of water!” With this, he collapsed, and was pronounced unambiguously dead within the hour.
By these accounts the brother unwisely devised a resurrection game, though those summoned from the grave, by Liam’s reckoning, were principally four-legged and incapable of giving descriptions of the other side. Lucien was unaware of these complications.
Particularly the gamer troubled over the dice, or rather the loss of a die. He rolled the one in his possession over the game board and claimed to hear its corresponder in another room. In these instances, the buzzing disturbance, which had preoccupied the younger brother, halted once the tumbling die came to rest. Every time the toss was repeated, the same reaction occurred. Silent intervals seemingly dissolved walls, and also any rooms hitherto imagined to occupy the outer circuit of the house. Nighttime had claimed these regions, and seized each lull as an opportunity to lurch closer.
Lucien wanted his brother to locate this second die and communicate the number on it; Liam was unwilling to accommodate the request.
The game’s initiator had started a game that he had no knowledge for how to end. He was compelled to return the game board to its box, along with its assorted contents. In this decision, he prevailed on his brother to replace the box on the closet shelf, given he was two inches taller.
The errand runner returned to the dining room table, and together with his brother waited for other complications of the imprudent game to develop.
Sky in the window drapes passed through particle shades of celadon and iron oxide into indigo blue, and too soon a knock issued somewhere from within the house; its corresponder, the die re-boxed behind the closet door, reacted. This local disturbance sounded in the way of a rapping knuckle, and was of force to jog the closet door in its track.
While this dream had skirted nightmare from the beginning, it showed every indication of preferring the latter as an outcome. The problematic door was on the brink of opening and, whether of drafts or corporeal ghosts, its tremulous state left the dreamer in shallower, guarded sleep until daybreak. Rising from his bed was not to leave it as thoroughly as he wished.
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