by Ellen Datlow
“I hope you enjoyed it,” he snapped when the lights came back on, and she didn’t bother to argue whose idea it had been. She was still thinking about how easy it was for a woman to disappear, once the right man was dead.
It was dark when they got out, and still raining. It would be a long ride home.
Tiptoe
Laird Barron
I WAS a child of the 1960s. Three network stations or fresh air; take your pick. No pocket computers for entertainment in dark-age suburbia. We read our comic books ragged and played catch with Dad in the backyard. He created shadow puppets on the wall to amuse us before bed. Elephants, giraffes, and foxes. The classics. He also made some animals I didn’t recognize. His hands twisted to form these mysterious entities, which he called Mimis. Dad frequently traveled abroad. Said he’d learned of the Mimis at a conference in Australia. His double-jointed performances wowed me and my older brother, Greg. Mom hadn’t seemed as impressed.
Then I discovered photography.
Mom and Dad gave me a camera. Partly because they were supportive of their children’s aspirations; partly because I bugged them relentlessly. At six years old, I already understood my life’s purpose.
Landscapes bore me, although I enjoy celestial photography—high-resolution photos of planets, hanging in partial silhouette; blazing white fingertips emerging from a black pool. People aren’t interesting either, unless I catch them in candid moments to reveal a glimmer of their hidden selves. Wild animals became my favorite subjects. Of all the variety of animals, I love predators. Dad approved. He said, Men revile predators because they shed blood. What an unfair prejudice. Suppose garden vegetables possessed feelings. Suppose a carrot squealed when bitten in two… Well, a groundhog would go right on chomping, wouldn’t he?
If anybody knew the answer to such a question, it’d be my old man. His oddball personality might be why Mom took a shine to him. Or she appreciated his potential as a captain of industry. What I do know is, he was the kind of guy nobody ever saw coming.
* * *
My name is Randall Xerxes Vance. Friends tease me about my signature—RX and a swooping, offset V. Dad used to say, Ha-ha, son. You’re a prescription for trouble! As a pro wilderness photographer, I’m accustomed to lying or sitting motionless for hours at a stretch. Despite this, I’m a tad jumpy. You could say my fight or flight reflex is highly tuned. While on assignment for a popular magazine, a technician— infamous for his pranks—snuck up, tapped my shoulder, and yelled, Boo! I swung instinctively. Wild, flailing. Good enough to knock him on his ass into a ditch.
Colleagues were nonplussed at my overreaction. Me too. That incident proved the beginning of a rough, emotional ride: insomnia; nightmares when I could sleep; and panic attacks. It felt like a crack had opened in my psyche. Generalized anxiety gradually worked its claws under my armor and skinned me to raw nerves. I committed to a leave of absence, pledging to conduct an inventory of possible antecedents.
Soul searching pairs seductively with large quantities of liquor.
A soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend offered to help. She opined that I suffered from deep-rooted childhood trauma. I insisted that my childhood was actually fine. My parents had provided for me and my brother, supported our endeavors, and paid for our education; the whole deal.
There’s always something if you dig, she said. Subsequent to a bunch more poking and prodding, one possible link between my youth and current troubles came to mind. I told her about a game called Tiptoe Dad taught me. A variation of ambush tag wherein you crept behind your victim and tapped him or her on the shoulder or goosed them, or whatever. Pretty much the same as my work colleague had done. Belying its simple premise, there were rules, which Dad adhered to with solemnity. The victim must be awake and unimpaired. The sneaker was required to assume a certain posture—poised on the balls of his or her feet, arms raised and fingers pressed into a blade or spread in an exaggerated manner. The other details and prescriptions are hazy.
As far as odd family traditions go, this seemed fairly innocuous. Dad’s attitude was what made it weird.
Tiptoe went back as far as I could recall, but my formal introduction occurred at age six. Greg and I were watching a nature documentary. Dad wandered in late, still dressed from a shift at the office and wearing that coldly affable expression he put on along with his hat and coat. The documentary shifted to the hunting habits of predatory insects. Dad sat between us on the couch. He stared intently at the images of mantises, voracious Venezuelan centipedes, and wasps. During the segment on trapdoor spiders, he smiled and pinched my shoulder. Dad was fast for an awkward, middle-aged dude. I didn’t even see his arm move. People say sneaky as a snake, sly as a fox, but spiders are the best hunters. Patient and swift. I didn’t give it a second thought.
One day, soon after, he stepped out of a doorway, grabbed me, and started tickling. Then he snatched me into the air and turned my small body in his very large hands. He pretended to bite my neck, arms, and belly. Which part shall I devour first? Eeny, meeny, miny moe! I screamed hysterical laughter. He explained that tickling and the reaction to tickling were rooted in primitive fight or flight responses to mortal danger.
Tiptoe became our frequent contest, and one he’d already inflicted on Greg and Mom. The results seldom amounted to more than the requisite tap, except for the time when Dad popped up from a leaf pile and pinched me so hard it left a welt. You bet I tried to return the favor—on countless occasions, in fact—and failed. I even wore camo paint and dressed in black down to my socks, creeping closer, ever closer, only for him to whip his head around at the last second and look me in the eye with a tinge of disappointment. Heard you coming from the other end of the house, son. Are you thinking like a man or a spider? Like a fox or a mantis? Keep trying.
Another time, I walked into a room and caught him playing the game with Mom as victim. Dad gave me a sidelong wink as he reached out, tiptoeing closer and closer. Their silhouettes flickered on the wall. The shadows of his arms kept elongating; his shadow fingers ended in shadow claws. The optical illusion made me dizzy and sick to my stomach. He kissed her neck. She startled and mildly cussed him. Then they laughed, and once more he was a ham-fisted doofus, innocently pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
As with many aspects of childhood, Tiptoe fell to the wayside for reasons that escaped me until the job incident brought it crashing home again. Unburdening to my lady friend didn’t help either of us as much as we hoped. She acknowledged that the whole backstory was definitely fucked up and soon found other places to be. Probably had a lot to do with my drinking, increasingly moody behavior, and the fact that I nearly flew out of my skin whenever she walked into the room.
* * *
The worst part? This apparent mental breakdown coincided with my mother’s health tribulations. A double whammy. After her stroke, Mom’s physical health gradually went downhill. She’d sold the house and moved into a comfy suite at the retirement village where Grandma resided years before.
The role of a calm, dutiful son made for an awkward fit, yet there wasn’t much choice, considering I was the last close family who remained in touch. Steeling my resolve, I shaved, slapped on cologne to disguise any lingering reek of booze, and drove down from Albany twice a week to hit a diner in Port Ewing. Same one we’d visited since the 1960s. For her, a cheeseburger and a cup of tea. I’d order a sandwich and black coffee and watch her pick at the burger. Our conversations were sparse affairs—long silences peppered with acerbic repartee.
She let me read to her at bedtime. Usually, a few snippets from Poe or his literary cousins. I’ve gotten morbid, she’d say. Give me some of that Amontillado, hey? Or, A bit of M.R. James, if you please. Her defining characteristics were intellectual curiosity and a prickly demeanor. She didn’t suffer fools—not in her prime, nor in her twilight. Ever shrewd and guarded, ever close-mouthed regarding her interior universe. Her disposition discouraged “remember-whens” and utterly repelled more probing inquirie
s into secrets.
Nonetheless, one evening I stopped in the middle of James’s “The Ash Tree” and shut the book. “Did Aunt Vikki really have the gift ?”
Next to Mom and Dad, Aunt Vikki represented a major authority figure of my childhood. She might not have gone to college like my parents, but she wasn’t without her particular abilities. She performed what skeptics (my mother) dismissed as parlor tricks. Stage magician staples like naming cards in someone’s hand, or locating lost keys or wallets. Under rare circumstances, she performed hypnotic regression and “communed” with friendly spirits. Her specialty? Astral projection allowed her to occasionally divine the general circumstances of missing persons. Whether they were alive or dead and their immediate surroundings, albeit not their precise location. Notwithstanding Dad’s benign agnosticism and Mom’s blatant contempt, I assumed there was something to it—the police had allegedly enlisted Vikki’s services on two or three occasions.
Nobody ever explained where she acquired her abilities. Mom and Dad brushed aside such questions and I dared not ask Aunt Vikki directly given her impatience with children.
“I haven’t thought of that in ages.” Mom lay in the narrow bed, covers pulled to her neck. A reading lamp reflected against the pillow and illuminated the shadow of her skull. “Bolt from the blue, isn’t it?”
“I got to thinking of her the other day. Her magic act. The last time we visited Lake Terror…”
“You’re asking whether she was a fraud.”
“Nothing so harsh,” I said. “The opposite, in fact. Her affinity for predictions seemed uncanny.”
“Of course it seemed uncanny. You were a kid.”
“Greg thought so.”
“Let’s not bring your brother into this.”
“Okay.”
She eyed me with a glimmer of suspicion, faintly aware that my true interest lay elsewhere; that I was feinting. “To be fair, Vikki sincerely believed in her connection to another world. None of us took it seriously. God, we humored the hell out of that woman.”
“She disliked Dad.”
“Hated John utterly.” Her flat, unhesitating answer surprised me.
“Was it jealousy? Loneliness can have an effect…”
“Jealousy? C’mon. She lost interest in men after Theo kicked.” Theo had been Aunt Vikki’s husband; he’d died on the job for Con Edison.
I decided not to mention the fact that she’d twice remarried since. Mom would just wave them aside as marriages of convenience. “And Dad’s feelings toward her?”
“Doubtful he gave her a second thought whenever she wasn’t right in front of his nose. An odd duck, your father. Warm and fuzzy outside, cold tapioca on the inside.”
“Damn, Mom.”
“Some girls like tapioca. What’s with the twenty questions? You have something to say, spill it.”
Should I confess my recent nightmares? Terrible visions of long-buried childhood experiences? Or that Dad, an odd duck indeed, starred in these recollections and his innocuous, albeit unnerving, Tiptoe game assumed a sinister prominence that led to my current emotional turmoil? I wished to share with Mom; we’d finally gotten closer as the rest of our family fell by the wayside. Still, I faltered, true motives unspoken. She’d likely scoff at my foolishness in that acerbic manner of hers and ruin our fragile bond.
She craned her neck. “You haven’t seen him around?”
“Who?” Caught off guard again, I stupidly concluded, despite evidence to the contrary, that her thoughts were fogged with rapid onset dementia. Even more stupidly, I blurted, “Mom, uh, you know Dad’s dead. Right?”
“Yeah, dummy,” she said. “I meant Greg.”
“The guy you don’t want to talk about?” Neither of us had seen my brother in a while. Absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder.
“Smart-ass.” But she smiled faintly.
In the wee hours, alone in my studio apartment, I woke from a lucid nightmare. Blurry, forgotten childhood images coalesced with horrible clarity. Aunt Vikki suffering what we politely termed an episode; the still image of a missing woman on the six o’clock news; my father, polishing his glasses and smiling cryptically. Behind him, a sun-dappled lake, a stand of thick trees, and a lost trail that wound into the Catskills… or Purgatory. There were other, more disturbing recollections that clamored for attention, whirling in a black mass on the periphery. Gray, gangling hands; a gray, cadaverous face…
I poured a glass of whiskey and dug into a shoebox of loose photos; mainly snapshots documenting our happiest moments as a family. I searched those smiling faces for signs of trauma, a hint of anguish to corroborate my tainted memories. Trouble is, old, weathered pictures are ambiguous. You can’t always tell what’s hiding behind the patina. Nothing, or the worst thing imaginable.
* * *
Whatever the truth might be, this is what I recall about our last summer vacation to the deep Catskills:
During the late 1960s, Dad worked at an IBM plant in Kingston, New York. Mom wrote colorful, acerbic essays documenting life in the Mid-Hudson Valley; sold them to regional papers, mainly, and sometimes slick publications such as The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. We had it made. House in the suburbs, two cars, and an enormous color TV. I cruised the neighborhood on a Schwinn ten-speed with the camera slung around my neck. My older brother, Greg, ran cross-country for our school. Dad let him borrow the second car, a Buick, to squire his girlfriend into town on date night.
The Vance clan’s holy trinity: Christmas; IBM Family Day; and the annual summer getaway at a cabin on Lake Terron. For us kids, the IBM Family Day carnival was an afternoon of games, Ferris wheel rides, running and screaming at the top of our lungs, and loads of deep-fried goodies. The next morning, Dad would load us into his Plymouth Suburban and undertake the long drive through the mountains. Our lakeside getaway tradition kicked off when I was a tyke—in that golden era, city folks retreated to the Catskills to escape the heat. Many camped at resorts along the so-called Borscht Belt. Dad and his office buddies, Fred Mercer and Leo Schrader, decided to skip the whole resort scene. Instead, they went in together on the aforementioned piece of lakefront property and built a trio of vacation cabins. The investment cost the men a pretty penny. However, nearby Harpy Peak was a popular winter destination. Ski bums were eager to rent the cabins during the holidays and that helped Dad and his friends recoup their expenses.
But let’s stick to summer. Dreadful hot, humid summer that sent us to Lake Terron and its relative coolness. Me, Greg, Mom, Dad, Aunt Vikki, and Odin, our dog; supplies in back, a canoe strapped up top. Exhausted from Family Day, Greg and I usually slept for most of the trip. Probably a feature of Dad’s vacation-management strategy. Then he merely had to contend with Mom’s chain-smoking and Aunt Vikki bitching about it. Unlike Mom and Dad, she didn’t do much of anything. After her husband was electrocuted while repairing a downed power line, she collected a tidy insurance settlement and moved from the city into our Esopus home. Supposedly a temporary arrangement on account of her nervous condition. Her nerves never did improve—nor did anyone else’s, for that matter.
We made our final pilgrimage the year before Armstrong left bootprints on the Moon. Greg and I were seventeen and twelve, respectively. Our good boy Odin sat between us. He’d outgrown his puppy ways and somehow gotten long in the tooth. Dad turned onto the lonely dirt track that wound a mile through heavy forest and arrived at the lake near sunset. The Mercers and Schraders were already in residence: a whole mob of obstreperous children and gamely suffering adults collected on a sward that fronted the cabins. Adults had gotten a head start on boilermakers and martinis. Grill-smoke wafted toward the beach. Smooth and cool as a mirror, the lake reflected the reddening sky like a portal to a parallel universe.
Lake Terron—or Lake Terror, as we affectionally called it—gleamed at the edge of bona fide wilderness. Why Lake Terror? Some joker had altered the N on the road sign into an R with spray-paint and it just stuck. Nights we
re pitch black five paces beyond the porch. The dark was full of insect noises and the coughs of deer lurching around in the brush.
Our cabin had pretty rough accommodations—plank siding and long, shotgun shack floorplan with a washroom, master bedroom, and a loft. Electricity and basic plumbing, but no phone or television. We lugged in books, cards, and board games to fashion a semblance of civilized entertainment. On a forest ranger’s advice, Dad always propped a twelve-gauge shotgun by the door. Black bears roamed the woods and were attracted to the scents of barbeque and trash. And children! Mom would say.
The barbeque set the underlying tone; friendly hijinks and raucous laughter always prevailed those first few hours. Revived from our torpor, kids gorged on hotdogs and cola while parents lounged, grateful for the cool air and peaceful surroundings—except for the mosquitos. Everybody complained about them. Men understood shop talk was taboo. Those who slipped up received a warning glare from his better half. Nor did anyone remark upon news trickling in via the radio, especially concerning the Vietnam War; a subject that caused mothers everywhere to clutch teenaged sons to their bosoms. “Camp Terror” brooked none of that doomy guff. For two weeks, the outside world would remain at arm’s length.
* * *
Mr. Schrader struck a bonfire as the moon beamed over Harpy Peak. Once the dried cedar burned to coals, on came the bags of marshmallows and a sharpened stick for each kid’s grubby mitt. I recall snatches of conversation. The men discussed the Apollo program, inevitably philosophizing on the state of civilization and how far we’d advanced since the Wright brothers climbed onto the stage.
“We take it for granted,” Mr. Mercer said.
“What’s that?” Mr. Schrader waved a marshmallow flaming at the end of his stick.
“Comfort, safety. You flip a switch, there’s light. Turn a key, a motor starts.”