After a number of days, Liam again became complacent about to-doings at work. He saw no one else there apart from his friend. One day he arrived home to trip over his sleeping bag lying in the bedroom floor. He could not account for his forgetfulness in not stashing it in the closet that morning. If its presence suggested an early bedtime, a ringing telephone interrupted this idea.
The nephew had believed his aunt’s phone disconnected many months hence. The device was located with difficulty in the sewing room. Bundles of dusty fabric were searched and, by appearance, this material was the abandoned beginnings of window curtains—such that exceeded the needs of the small prairie house. Nothing beneficial could arise from answering the phone call, but its summons was amplified tenfold throughout the house over the intercom system.
Howard reminded his friend, “Your winter classes at the community college begin tonight.”
“Why didn’t you remind me of this earlier at work?”
The caller may have shrugged, but this communication was unavailing in the situation.
The annex was unlocked. The absent-minded instructor stepped panting through the double doors with nightfall uncomfortably close behind him. The clock in the lobby gave him five minutes to spare, but his haste to arrive on time meant he failed to pack still-life objects in his bicycle’s basket. Turning up to his classroom unprepared without a lesson plan was his peculiar terror, yet his éclat and resourcefulness in these matters overcame every privation.
His perennial student Howard approached him and offered one additional dilemma. “The utility cabinet is locked. You have no access to clamp lights.” He then gestured toward the middle of the large common room where a partial solution was supplied. “I had a hurricane lamp in my truck.”
A large, low-built wooden platform sat in this area, and served equally for setups of still-life subjects or a posing model. The lantern might suffice for spelunking or crawling under a house, but it could only glower over a sparse scene from its slatted chair.
What occupied this table was just as unpromising—pillows. These were heaped on one another in a make-do landscape, and some coaxing was required to seduce an artistic arrangement from them.
While surveying the room for complementary objects, a young woman, who did not comport herself with the nonchalance of a student, stepped up to the instructor. “I am here to model. Where can I change into my costume?”
“Costume?”
“I brought a costume for my pose.”
It odd that this stranger should arrive at the school with both initiative and presumption about a lesson plan, yet he was grateful for her offer. It was odd that this stranger should arrive at the school with both initiative and presumption about a lesson plan, yet he was grateful for her offer.
Directions were given to the restroom, and Liam turned back to the low table to clear it for his model. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw where the young woman had not left the room but disrobed in front of the students. She was down to bra and panties, which were as stark white as her skin was fair.
“You need to change in the restroom,” he repeated nervously.
Having said as much, he examined her under the unsympathetic florescent fixtures, and saw where its bluish light highlighted purple and jaundiced bruises that covered parts of her body. He was on the point of asking if she needed assistance when she exited the classroom. Were it not for his befuddlement, the teacher may have remarked sooner on the model’s resemblance to the woman on the posted factory flyer.
Howard had paid no attention to the woman’s features. Moreover, he was of the mind that no offer of modeling had been made by anyone in the room.
The model did not return, so a female student was sent to find her. When this person did not return after a sensible time, Liam was returned to his distress about having no assignment.
A ratty blanket was found among the drawing horses, and on returning to the table of pillows, it was draped over them in a bid to create a pleasing series of folds. The composition was deemed sufficiently challenging to occupy the students.
Howard, with rare gruffness, complained, “I have no wish to draw a blanket heaped on a table. That subject reminds me of measles-infested blankets your ancestors gave mine.”
He left the room.
The remainder of the students stared at the still life, but none commenced drawing. When one was asked what the problem was, the young man complained, “Whatever is under that blanket won’t stop fidgeting.”
The table was again surveyed, and something was changed in the composition. A ceiling vent overhead was the likely instigator in this unsanctioned redistribution of folds, so the fabric was fanned over the pillowy pile and the subject matter recast. A few apprehensive clicks of his attendance pen followed from the doorway, but the situation was judged stable enough for the instructor to leave the room and conduct a search for the missing model.
Repairs were underway to the other end of the building. Tiles of compressed fiberboard had been removed from brackets in the dropped ceiling and left to accumulate on the floor.
Wading through this ruin, the searcher saw no underside to roof timbers or conduit. If he believed this was an empty night sky on display, the lack of a detectable draft persuaded him against the formulation.
The model was not in the bathroom, and walking to the far end of the hall produced neither her nor the woman sent to find her.
The annex was a solidly built cinderblock structure, yet the westernmost wall was unsupported plasterboard. Situationally it marked an exterior boundary, though bore no fire door or any other door. It was undistinguished apart from a bulletin board, which was bare but for a surplus of staples and pushpins. Snips of paper were snagged among these fasteners where announcements had been ripped down. The staples, in not being pulled clean, stuck out like cactus pricks and suggested, in the hazard they presented to passersby, a hasty evacuation.
One remaining tear of paper was fluorescent pink, and might have been the original flyer for the artist model. The teacher wished against its removal simply for purposes of comparing its visage to that of the missing young woman.
The flimsy wall was thought too insubstantial to be a permanent fixture, and was more like a shoddily erected rampart that would buy no more than two or three minutes as a delaying tactic against whatever advancing adversary should test it.
A protuberant shape occupied this wall. It was first feared to be a night bug, but closer examination revealed it to be a cutout for a switch box. By sight, this opening communicated with nothing more sinister than the parking lot, yet in lingering over it, something was spotted leaning against the far side of the wall.
Liam pressed the slab of plasterboard, which warbled and pushed back. This action was repeated with force, and whatever rested against the partition lifted briefly away from it before resuming its position. This object possessed enough weight to make the wall bow inward, yet was not so hard as to sound loudly against the substrate when propelling back onto his blow.
Quitting his search, the instructor came on his friend laying across a sofa in the student lounge. Howard was tucked into the darkest corner of the room, and upwind of the disinfected fluorescence that was, everywhere else, unflagging. His concealment was not so good as he may have imagined. In being found out, he did not shrink from the complication.
“Why are you here and not drawing?” asked the teacher.
A sparing defense was offered. “I am playing dead.”
“Why are you playing dead?”
“Because my people have no word for goodbye in our language.“
Liam was not disposed to humor his friend’s funereal pronouncements, and since Howard was not inspired to draw pillows, or measles-infested blankets, he was left where he was found.
The instructor returned down the corridor. Passing several classrooms, other students were seen to have taken similar initiative to disperse. In each case, they sat on the floor with their newsprint pads opened over their laps. They faced away from the doorway and sketched, by appearances, unoccupied corners in the rooms. Not only had they abandoned the still life, but their endeavors were further handicapped by switching off the overhead lights.
The darkness at the other side of the building would waste little time in construing this darkness as identical to its own, and claim each room in the way rot incrementally claims a fish.
Liam arrived at his classroom in a troubled state; one student remained there. She too had turned off the lights and faced an empty corner. Gazing over her murky effort, only rivers of black, molting charcoal of little descriptive detail covered her paper.
“It is an awful thing to draw,” she confided with anguish.
Sights were trained on the corner, and for all his skill in seeing, the instructor saw nothing. He fetched the lantern from the forsaken still-life and explored the premonitory pocket of shadow.
His light bounced off either of the two walls, but did not illuminate the place were they joined. This point of convergence was theoretical by his inability to locate it.
The searcher succeeded in rousing a new shadow, which was instantly pushing toward him through the interstice. This dark specimen produced no relief where his lamp struck it squarely. Its blurred outline swarmed like wasps over a disrupted nest.
The lantern was wisely turned from the corner and the teacher resolved to do the only thing that made sense: to wake from his involved and protracted nightmare.
Resigning his academic responsibilities with uncharacteristic ease, he crawled on top of the disfavored table of pillows. The light, returned to the slatted chair, decanted its buttery light over the bedding arrangement.
Liam did not intend himself to be a still-life subject, so turned away from the drawing horses and pulled the blanket over him.
Footsteps preceded him to a period of inattentiveness. He was certain his model had returned to the classroom. A trough of still air lay between them, but the eidolon was not delineated in any degree against the backlight. She wore a vintage costume with ruche sleeves, one whose fusty lace was unsuitable for sleep, but was perhaps appropriate for modeling. The garment’s aged smell was as sharp as its creases.
The more these unpleasant sensations pressed on his senses, the more Liam believed this was a presentation of burial clothes. He was surprisingly calm composing this idea, yet was incapable of confronting his bed partner due to a pronounced inertia of sleep.
Scribbling from his solitary student gained in volume, and though nothing of her was seen for the outline of his bedfellow, the teacher sensed other students may have rejoined her in the room. He was certain that they now drew the model, the table, and him.
This need to remain motionless added to his paralysis.
A portion of the model’s face surrendered to his searching gaze. It mesmerized chiefly because its remainder dipped into blacker regions of his sleep to channel memories like disguises. This was the reverse of a Rorschach test since only half an inkblot was exhibited.
The scribbling he had imagined no longer resembled pencils on newsprint paper, but instead compared to wriggling. It was the costume and not the bed partner that stirred. Maggots or burrowing insects erupted in his mind.
“Are you the missing woman?”
Light gained from the bedroom window—the riser sprang from the floor. A cloud of dust, such as unleashed from the manhandled remains of a mummy, swirled in the pale exigent light. Liam stepped after his phantom, yet pursued its immateriality no further than the hall.
The authenticity in the extended dream astonished the dreamer, as it had manufactured a complete day (or its strong impression) to fulfill a plot.
“When did my dream begin?” he pleaded urgently.
Howard glanced at a folding chair across the break room table. “Well, it did not begin before our exchange with the consultant. There still sits his walking cane.”
The other could not shake the moribund aspect of his nightmare. “Eventually I will dream only of myself in bed trying to sleep, all the while immersed in a sleep from which I will not wake.”
His coworker explained, “Death is transitional. A sliding scale. Where one stands on one side of the door, he cannot know the measure of the one who answers, or whether his arriving at this door was to summon or be summoned.”
Liam had no dream that evening, and perhaps because his previous one was so vivid.
An exemplary daybreak set the distraught man looking for evidence that he was genuinely awake. Whatever he imagined himself to have packed that week at the factory was carried off by freight truck, so little was left to coordinate to a calendar.
When Howard failed to make an appearance following the first brew of coffee, an inquiry was made after his whereabouts.
The supervisor informed, “Mr. Meade was taken to the hospital yesterday. Packing materials trapped and crushed one of his legs.”
The inquirer found this scenario unlikely, and suspected collusion (or worse) on the part of his employers.
Echoes were everywhere in the emptying building; and perhaps more than could be wedded to an overactive imagination. An unimpeded line of sight now connected the two ends of Building B.
Liam was drawn to a heavy metal door at its far end, which was locked. The factory’s substantial chimney lay beyond this barrier. A small window in the door revealed two glass panes separated by chicken wire. Pieces of mannequins were seen scattered on dim shelves beyond them. These specimens were colored oddly, as if made with an experimental pigment that failed. In that late hour of the afternoon, one may have been persuaded that these simulacra had not always been lifeless—
For want of an occupation, Liam left the factory never to return.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.