The friend’s theories deserved the attention of a minute, and something in their adumbration was taken from the premises.
Liam did not cycle home immediately, but toward town to check his postbox; it contained no mail. The doors of the municipal theatre, which stood across the street from the post office, were stopped open. Stage lights were effulgent and reached as far as the sidewalk.
The marquee announced the impending engagement of a world-renowned hypnotist, but in surveying the lobby, and then the rear of the auditorium, nothing was seen to occupy the stage floor but strips of gaffer’s tape in preparation for the placement of props. No less than two hammers were heard battering away backstage. Their rhythm suggested an off-kilter gait, as any moment someone in heavy shoes might charge in from an unlit portion of the stage to throw the trespasser out.
Liam left in anticipation of this outcome, but glanced more than once over his shoulder; dusk and stage light conspired to hurry after him. Reaching the end of the block, he puzzled over on the elaborate stage preparations, which could not be readily connected to the simple needs of a hypnotist.
A subdued mood was sustained through dinner. The resident had no expectation that his previous dream would be revisited, but his dream that evening appeared superficially to be a continuation:
Blythe prepared to drive her children across the river into Arkansas. These getaways were typically to visit family, but the son suspected his mother intended to take him to the hospital since he was dressed in pajamas. His siblings wore the same bedtime attire, and for what reason, other than sympathy for their ailing brother, the youngest son could not comprehend. He chiefly complained of an earache, and of a fluttering percussive effect felt in the small bones of his inner ear.
His mother had examined his ear, and lingered over it more seconds than it deserved. Parent and children were soon away, but overshot the hospital by thirty miles.
The late start placed gaining shadows ahead of their path. The sun was beneath the rusting trestle bridges, where the orange pearls of cotton bolls glow. The family group traveled parallel to a fledging tributary overrun by waters of a spring melt:
The Muddy Mississippi knew no bound, as all were washed in The Blood of Resurrection.
A sign heralding Hughes’ football team ‘The Blue Devils’ stood at the far edge of the day, while past it, a charcoal dusk offered only obfuscation and a hometown rebuilt by nightmare. The alumna was nonetheless committed to touring these locations of fond memory, and showed little apprehension driving the main thoroughfare.
On one side of the street, large organ pipes of mud daubers hung from ceded storefronts. Teetering shanties of driftwood and tarpaper stood across from them; these were already behind the curtain of night.
Native structures were appropriated, and intended to disguise mounds of invading termites or some other eusocial order. Their designs lay in the haphazard regurgitation of an insect’s stomach and not in the zone planning of city government. Nothing in these renovations was consistent with an improvement to property, because nothing short of a cyclonic wind would allow these architects admittance into any home. How else might one explain how epithelial tissue came by its infelicitous adenoma?
Blythe was oblivious to these developments, and thought the town overtaken by Mexicans and tamales shops. Darkness begged her further down the road, where papery larva lined the shoulder…
Or were these sheet-draped cadavers?
A visit to Dairy Queen was recommended to disperse the gloom. This was an occasional treat for the children on regional travels. Everyone got a small ice cream sundae topped with nuts, chocolate sauce, and strawberry purée. The journey was soon rejoined.
Having never bothered to turn on the headlights, Blythe showed little reaction when the windshield on her side of the car began to frost over.
Liam was certain this iciness proceeded from her untouched dessert sitting on the dashboard. He touched his mother’s cheek and found it similarly cold, although its rigidity may have owed to a foreign body (perhaps a cotton boll) in her mouth.
He inquired after the nature of her dental work, but the parent explained (with too much explanation) about how a loss of muscle mass was a part of aging, and about how skin was the largest human organ and needed shoring up.
Satisfied, the son turned his attention to the passenger window, where pruned branches rained down from distant trees. This activity was not due to a tornado but to a harvest of pecans and walnuts, whose purpose was, properly, to make future toppings for dairy treats. Liam could not imagine how else the region should come by dessert ingredients where roads were too underdeveloped for incoming freight trucks.
Figures with lanterns fussed over these cuttings in darkenss, but little of the nutmeat was collected. Their torchlight shot across the landscape with nervous convulsions, as if searching for something far-in-coming through thicker trees to the west. It could have been oddments of straying clouds they saw, or dark-skinned laborers in the cotton fields given the woeful tune bellowing forth like corrugated roofs rolled up in a great wind. Only the rambunctious Mississippi River, whose spring waters busily overran the bluffs, might rival this threat of weather.
Blythe next stopped at a gas station owned by Liam’s fraternal grandfather, which was seemingly uprooted by the storm and carried across a county line. Despite this upheaval, free tea glasses (with every fill-up) were still neatly displayed in its large plate-glass window.
Ernie worked as a mechanic for his father, and emerged out from under a hydraulic lift in the garage wiping his hands on an oil rag. The car in service bore no wheels, and from below, a motorist was seen slumped over its steering column: This sleeping gentleman was prepared to wait out the night until repairs were finished.
A dry-cleaned suit of Sunday best clothes was removed from the family car’s trunk for the father, though this formalwear was nothing lightly removed from a front-room closet. It was an assemblage of polyester scraps safety-pinned to shirtsleeves of a dress shirt, which followed the outline of a tailor’s fitting for alterations. Owing to this precarious (even provisional) state of dress, Blythe continued to drive.
Gravel under the Impala’s tires shifted in grade to identify each byway, and to elicit, similarly, varying degrees of pressure in Liam’s head. An occasional mercury-bulbed light pole converged on the rural landscape, where only the immediate surrounding surrendered to wary examination.
More than one open barn door was passed, and within them large tarpaulins, deployed like encampments of circus tents, bore little tone or color. Presumably tractors and ploughs sheltered under this winterization, but nothing in the vinyl spires suggested practical machinery. For several miles this pairing of lamp poles and draped forms occurred until their last appearance, where the latter, in being spotted distantly, came to life.
The tarpaulin enlarged and billowed. The shape beneath it appeared tethered, if not by one star then by another of blacker body: one possessing gravity sufficient to whirl objects more readily seen around it. It was difficult to determine if this outline gained on a true horizon, or if pecan trees shrank relative to it. What may have been small close by seemed, through intense concentration, to be inconceivably huge faraway.
The child reasoned that this was swarming mud dabbers (or termites) imitating a tornado. If this was not the wholesale relocation of a colony, then it was the effective bluff of a territorial monster.
The aqueous humor of Liam’s eyes sloshed in an opposite, diminished direction, removing all evidence of these harrowing distortions.
Somewhere past Jonesboro, a ramshackle erupted alongside the same road. The children were unaccustomed to seeing their grandmother’s country store outside the sanctuary of daylight.
Ernie sought to alleviate these concerns by pointing out where, by sight of starlight, a fence was newly erected on the property to prevent querulous geese from attacking visitors.
The grandson saw only a propane tank in low synchronistic orbit, and then, against upper branches of a scraggly tree, signage for a former Pure Oil filling station. Though the gas pumps were removed in recent memory, Liam did not recall a fiberglass figure paired to this defunct display. With creased, straight-legged trousers, the towering mechanic gazed down the dark gravel road that had produced the travelers. His painted-on eyes betrayed no living thought, though, in expression, shared the children’s mild panic. The grandson would not look back in the way the giant preferred; and were his eardrums not to blame, he still felt percussive effects of the road he could no longer hear:
Corpse flies and other infestation stirred under this thawing ground…
Assurance was gained only when a grave marker, built of popsicle sticks, was passed on the property. This was the resting place of Tippy, for whom the gravel road and vehicular traffic ended his life. Liam had drawn a picture of the dog’s grave on butcher paper for his grandmother.
Shadows compassed the crackling fire of a potbelly stove inside the homestead’s largest room, and here little cousins and siblings gathered on the tin-plated hearth to complain of earaches. Aunt Jo Catherine poured hot glycerin drops into their ears from a bottle on the stovetop grate and ended their crying jags. The patients drew together in a narcotic huddle in front of the fire, where radiant heat sank into their forebrains to send each child into unremitting sleep.
Liam remained wakeful a while longer.
During this interlude, his father began setting up his home movie projector. A retractable screen of white polyurethane and silica rose like a sail from a dark inlet, and illuminated the projectionist in weak, granulated light. Ernie presently threaded a doctored piece of film onto a reel while conversation elsewhere in the room centered on Hughes, Arkansas. Blythe explained how the town’s new insect residents remade the Blue Devil school mascot in their own image, and were having it shipped in.
The super-eight footage accompanying this explanation was recognized as Ernie’s infamous barge shot from the Helena bluff. The monotonously long Mississippi riverboat dragged on like shelf paper for three-quarters of the reel, and somewhere in the middle of viewing it, everyone forgot what they were watching. A blue tarpaulin covered the mysterious cargo, but this was as close as anyone would come in unmasking the devil.
Blythe mentioned Grandfather Lester in her next breath, and his warning about Baal and other false idols being brought into the delta by the Canaanites (if indeed the insectl order originated in Canaan).
The father was convinced that, whatever was portrayed in the film, it originated from inside his Eastman-Kodak projector, and like a snake coiled up in a child’s neglected dollhouse left out-of-doors overnight. Listen, he cautioned. “It’s learned to open doors.”
Because the film included no soundtrack, the clatter of the projector’s overheating motor was taken to be this invasion. It resembled the thronging of frangible insect wings.
When Liam next glimpsed the screen, another of the father’s failed cinematic ventures was exhibited. This time the filmmaker panned his camera fruitlessly (and again for too long) over a grainy, under-lit doorway. The house was the one in Blytheville, and the shot’s justification centered on the maternal grandfather, going by the faint outline of a silvery dome seen past the door molding.
The grandson thought that Lester Earl was either protesting his son-in-law filming him or, more probably, engaging the camera in his impish game of peek-a-boo, which was something he did frequently with the grandchildren.
The patriarch was a ghost even before his passing, plodding in a mournful retrograde motion through Ernie’s super eights. The physical record of his existence had steadily retreated into an ectoplasmic veil of camphor and nitrocellulose, and now cured in reel tins under brittle strips of labeled masking tape. These markers had fallen off one by one, like grave markers uprooted by an inattentive groundskeeper’s lawn mower.
The projected doorway containing the saturnine grandfather spatially receded, being displaced through a connecting passageway in the duplex house. Should this be the residence of more distant relations, it was not so close or familiar to give Ernie license to film it.
Veiled daylight penetrated this room, and intensified and weakened repeatedly. This was first thought to be due to dispersing clouds, but a lampshade was imagined to dim and brighten where a fly, like shadowy ball bearing, circled inside it.
These fluctuations proved deleterious: The film began to split and dissolve. Human figures emerged into the open in the last frames, but too late to be identified. Though they moved in non-threatening ways, their final degradation did not resonate with the stirrings, or reenactments, of immediate family.
Lighting regularly presented a problem for the cameraman in his procession of mysterious doorways, because there was never enough illumination to fill them. Ernie constantly repositioned his scolding hot lamps, even while filming, which left participants in his cinematography temporarily blinded. Despite their best cooperation, only the dimmest gossamer outlines were recorded for posterity.
This correctly described the last film to be shown, which featured a gift exchange on Christmas morning. Here Ernie repeatedly interrupted the activity. He was seen darting into the picture with more high-wattage pole lamps; and surely their object was to discover whoever stood inside one more unpromising doorway beyond the Christmas tree.
Liam expected this time it would be his fraternal grandmother, unhooked for the occasion from her feeding tube. Lamps were dragged to within inches of this opening, but not an inch of darkness submitted to them. Eventually the filmmaker entered the connecting room, so to pull his camera-shy interloper into the open, but his unscheduled absence constituted one additional mystery:
Who was the cameraman while the cameraman was away?
Ernie remained in the under-lit room; and like a consciousness surviving death.
Time within these films, whether composed of pantomimic antics or unheard conversations, was longer in being relived than memory served—and yet a world within a world paraded alongside expectation.
The uncooperative doorway lingered in the background. The grandson believed he spotted geese, pale and white, rampaging along this perimeter. Currents of convection drove the darkness like a wind toward him, but was this effect, as Ernie supposed, created by crematory chambers within the film projector?
These specters sent the frightened child through a doorway opposite the screen in search of his mother, but Granny’s store afforded no place for adult members of the family to bed down. Moreover, these outer rooms benefited little from the cast-iron stove. The smell of hardened dog feces was ripe in the chill: House-dwelling dogs, in being confined to these rooms throughout the nighttime, roamed at liberty.
Further into the darkness, less mindfulness attended corners where night and chill worked tirelessly on the mind. Here an aroma of stale carbon, or burnt bones, dominated. The remains of a second furnace lay close by—but it too much resembled a dwarf star whose attraction outlived its warmth.
Everything connected to the grandson’s understanding was feeble and late, and he did not fail to apprehend a contrary will at work, or perhaps a will composed of many.
The dreaded geese bounded onto his path—or were these blowing drapes? No physical dimension to the air was capable of this effect.
These were not curtains, but automatons dressed in white robes and arranged in a religious tableau:
Christ washed the feet of the disciples to remove the corruption of flesh. Here, the physics beneath muscle and sinew dissolved, and ceased to push able shadows into the light of oil lamps. He prayed that the Burden of Death should be lifted from Him in that hour; but embraced what every man lastly fears.
The fiberglass Pure Oil mechanic, in straight-creased trousers, stood apart from the apostles. His gaze remained fixed to where the road lay hidden in darkness; his diaphragm ears were tuned to the smooth rocks and their disruption. Faintest photons collected in this sentinel’s eyes, and by extrapolation of reason produced evidence of true movement such as the boy did not see. Was this mere pretense of vigilance while the disciples slept? Inanimate eyes were incapable of purpose, but a black-bodied star would not require their token while one grandchild remained awake.
When at last he succumbed to sleep, mud daubers in irrigation ditches east and south flew into the breach and served, in their number, as placeholders for the new emerging order.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.