Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  It opened after a moment to reveal a plain-looking woman in her early thirties. She wore a sweatshirt and jeans; carried a box of Frosted Flakes in her hand. Ambient noise of a cartoon show and kids arguing behind her. TV was probably on the kitchen counter.

  “Yes?” No smile. Wary, despite Jack’s purposely well-groomed appearance.

  “I hope you’ll excuse me, ma’am, but my name is Jack Trent—I used to live here. In your house.”

  He paused to get a read on her. While he spoke she’d been once-overing his topcoat from Barney’s and his Italian leather loafers with those little tassels on the tops.

  “Yes…”

  Still non-committal. But that was fine. At least she hadn’t slammed the door in his face or informed him she didn’t want to interrupt her husband while he was cleaning his guns.

  “Well, I have a kind of unusual request. You see, I grew up in this house, and when I moved out—almost thirty years ago, well, I never came back. My parents sold the place, moved to an apartment.”

  She leaned against the doorframe, definitely more relaxed now.

  “I don’t think I understand, Mr…?”

  “Trent. Jack Trent. Just call me Jack.”

  “Mr. Trent, okay, Jack. What exactly do you want.”

  Jack smiled the smile his girlfriend invariably said made him look like a little lost boy.

  (only this time, they might be right…)

  “Well,” he said, pausing a little drama and feigned reluctance. “I wanted to rent your house for a little while.”

  She half-smiled. “Rent my house? We live here, Mr. Trent! What’re you talking about?”

  He pushed on. “I won’t need it for very long. Maybe a week, maybe only a few days. You could spend a few days on mini-vacation, maybe. Stay at a nice hotel, whatever…”

  “Listen, I don’t want to sound rude, but I’m a single parent, I work two jobs, and I don’t have any time or money for any ‘mini-vacations’.”

  Jack smiled. As they said in the sales seminars, it was time to make his close. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t have your name…”

  “Sudbrook. Dorothy Sudbrook.”

  “Well, Dorothy, how about this—you see, I’ve made some money in my time. And time is money, so what would you say to, ah, me renting your house for, oh, say, whatever it would cost you to pay off the mortgage on this place?”

  She actually laughed, albeit sardonically. “Look…Jack, or whatever your name is, I don’t have time for this. Are you crazy?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.” Jack pulled a paperback edition of Malignancy out of his topcoat pocket. The cover hyped the usual #1 New York Times Bestseller across the top in gold foil. He flipped it over to expose his full-color photo on the back. “But I’m also rich,” he said.

  ⟡

  Two days later, Jack was sitting alone in the kitchen where his mother once served him up eggs in every cookable mode on an almost daily basis. He smiled as he considered those precholesterol-conscious days, and realized for the first time how small the room actually was. Yet it had been the nexus for his little family. Resonating with the after-images of 20,000 shared meals, 5,000 homework assignments, and at least several hundred lethal domestic battles, Jack let the ghost-memories of the house pass through him like radiation.

  The Sudbrook house wrapped itself around him in a quiet blanket. Dorothy and her two pre-schoolers had packed up and headed for Disney World so fast you’d have thought they’d hit the lottery.

  (And in a way, they had.)

  After their station wagon cleared the driveway, Jack had gone immediately to work by walking through each room of the house, (well, almost each one…) just absorbing whatever might still remain there of his childhood. He’d noticed two things almost instantly: the first was the inability of Dorothy Sudbrook’s furniture and general stuff to disguise the house’s true identity. In every room, Jack saw everything the way it had been, the way it was supposed to be. The second thing was less obvious, but no less true: the house literally hemorrhaged with memories, impressions, vibes, whatever you wanted to call them. They flowed out of the walls and into Jack with such force it was actually a physical sensation.

  Nemmy had been so right on. Everything he’d ever become could trace its roots back to this house. If there was any hope to recapture what had been leached from him, it would be found here. A knock at the door stopped his woolgathering; he stood up to stare at it in stark panic until he remembered phoning in a pizza.

  Hungrier than he’d figured, Jack wolfed down four slices without hardly taking a breath. Nervous energy required a lot of fuel, and he was a lot more scared than he’d figured he’d be. Outside, sunlight faltered, then finally retreated from the windowpanes, leaving a dull smear of twilight on the glass. It would be dark any minute.

  (Time to find you, old buddy…)

  Jack helped himself to the paper towels over the little sink and cleaned himself up. Then he passed through the living room where the old Emerson television had squatted for years, dispensing the magic of Winky-Dink and Howdy-Doody and Film Funnies. Shadows followed him as evening surrendered and Jack stood at the foot of the stairs. A brief memory gammaed through him: a 4-year-old Randolph at the top of these same stairs, naked and dripping wet after he’d run from the bath so excited to hear Daddy walk in the front door. An extra step and he’d tumbled ass-over-end to the spot where Jack now stood. Somehow, he’d been unhurt; Daddy said it was a miracle as he carried him back up.

  But now there was nobody to carry him, nobody to help, if anything were to send Jack rolling.

  (Anything? No, it’s not anything…I’d say it was a very specific thing…)

  Jack grabbed the polished banister, worn smooth by years of human traffic, and began the ascent into his past. The passage seemed to narrow as he drew closer to the top. The landing ended in a blank wall, with a brief left onto the main hallway. To the left lay a master bedroom full of scattered women’s clothing, a little girl’s room straight across and to the right a bathroom and a third and final bedroom.

  Turning right, Jack fumbled for the hallway lightswitch, then decided against it. Memories leaked out of the walls, battering him like bad poetry. It was better this way, he knew. He stepped forward, down the hall, past the bathroom, toward a door half-closed.

  Since entering the house, Jack had avoided this final room. He knew the time was not yet right. But now, as he neared the last threshold, the final barrier between his origins and his present sorry-assed state, he could feel it playing out like a well-written script. Something surged and lurched within the frame of the house, something massive, yet amorphous. A presence, yes, but more like a substantial abstraction than merely a physical thing. Jack had no words to describe whatever seethed within the very fabric of the house, but he could feel it just fine, thank you.

  Flip-time!

  That’s okay with me, you little fucker…Let’s get on with it…

  Gonna flip you out, Jack.

  Just as his hand closed in upon the doorknob, Jack snapped back as though tire-ironed. Had he actually heard that? Had it called him by name?

  (Go on. Time to find out…)

  He touched the knob, half-expecting some kind of blue flame to dance across the gap to spark his flesh. But the brass was cold and dead, ignoring him. The door swung inward and the secret place, the sanctum sanctorum of the only child, the boy of dreams, the fantasy chamber, gave up its mysteries.

  There was no light and yet there was all the detail he’d ever need. The shadows spoke to him, and he knew the fixtures of Dorothy Sudbrook’s child did not inhabit this place. Scents assaulted him with their ancient powers of memory: airplane glue, crayon wax, and neetsfoot oil.

  Jack stepped into the room, and touched the talisman at his neck. The ancient metal burned him with its purity—a cool, clean, non-polluting energy-source. He looked into the space before him.

  And like an old, brown-gray photograph, the room reflected the hazy continuum of a
small boy named Randolph Trent. It was more spare than he remembered it: a dresser, a low set of shelves full of toys and comic books, and a desk. A few Crayola drawings on the walls, chintz curtains at the window.

  And right in front of him, so close its wood almost brushed his leg, sat Mr. Flip.

  Incredibly, Jack hadn’t seen it when he first entered the space. But his old buddy, although translucent and gauzy, was undeniably there as Jack eased past its traditional resting place. Slowly, it gathered more reality to itself. Form and configuration. Substance.

  Moving quickly, Jack strode to the corner of the room where his old single bed waited like an old friend. He could feel the eyes of Mr. Flip lazily tracking him as he sat down to confront the ancient nemesis.

  Flip-time, Jack!

  Ever since deciding to return to Crescent Street, part of Jack had always figured that any contact with his old enemy would reveal Mr. Flip to be nothing more than a silly boojum from childhood, a lifeless icon.

  But the thing that waited for him, that had waited for more than two generations, remained as repellent and loathsome as ever. Jack felt a dark aura issuing from it like a poisonous vapor. Whatever it had been, whatever of it still remained, this grotesque piece of furniture was much more than that. It possessed an animus, an essence that held him.

  Without thinking, Jack reached up to touch Nemmy’s talisman. The cool silver contact felt mildly galvanic.

  Gonna flip you! Gonna flip-flip-flip you out, Jackie boy!

  (What are you?)

  The thought slipped out of him so effortlessly. He hadn’t planned a dialogue with this monster taking shape before him. If anything, it was uglier than even he had remembered it.

  I am a part of you, Jack-bo. I am a piece of the rock—the original chaos. I am the stuff of time and matter. The stuff that’s always trying to return to the primal center of things. I am the Reducer. I see order and I abhor it. Reductio ad absurdum.

  (But why me? What did you want with me?) Jack felt another one of those sudden, molten needs for a cigarette or a pull off the bourbon bottle.

  Don’t flatter yourself. I’m just here for you. Don’t you see it yet?

  Jack had seen enough, had felt enough. He understood now that his old nemesis was nothing more than an energy source, as were all the passionate events of our lives. And that the most wondrous paradox of it all was this: Mr. Flip didn’t want him, didn’t need him; it was the other way around.

  Standing up, Jack’s body seemed to fill the little bedroom. The whole house appeared to be getting smaller, as if he’d Alice-like drank from a magic phial.

  As though it sensed the essential, yet unexpected truth, Mr. Flip began folding into itself, collapsing into that null-space where nightmare and trauma reside. But before it could warp back to that place, Jack made his move.

  (Sorry, but I need you, old buddy…)

  Jack reached down and grabbed for the apparition, only half-shocked to feel his hands touch something rough, hewn, something real. How could it be back after all this time? Jack saw it destroyed forty years ago, and yet he knew that his need had made it real again.

  The wood, or whatever it was, grew hot as the skin of his fingers sang out with pain. He wanted to break loose from the thing, but it was too late. The smell of his own seared flesh was only as real as he would allow it. He knew that now. The furnace-room of his imagination, cold and slaked by success, had been fired up again. Mr. Flip was his dilithium crystal, Scotty, and he knew he was going nowhere without him.

  (We’re going to play this out…no stopping it now.)

  And then he was half-running down the hall, passing through the rooms of memory, bursting free of the place and into the cool, blue arms of night. Mr. Flip along for the ride, following the fiery path of a father’s cometary mission to deliver his son from terror. Jack felt an atavistic burst from the core of his…(soul?) being, a surge of true power, trunk-lined to one of nature’s primal generators. As he covered the back yard in long strides, he felt more vital and full of purpose than he could ever remember.

  And Mr. Flip had stopped talking to him.

  No more whiny sing-song voice carving up the darkness with its vile rhythms. No, no, no. As Jack covered the distance in the backyard with long strides, the thing writhing under his grip could only manage a pitiable and plaintive moan. This monster he freighted across the plains of his childhood, whatever it truly was, sensed its destiny, and if it was capable of fear, it was feeling it now. Jack knew now for the first time that the piece of furniture, long-gone, had only been the host to this psychic parasite, this mindworm of the soul.

  Jack knew this.

  (And knowledge was indeed power, wasn’t it, you little piece of shit?)

  He touched the talisman again.

  The corner of the yard loomed in the gray half-light. Dad’s old barbecue chimney had crumbled away years before, but something still waited in its place. Like a lighthouse, a beacon, the ghostly shape of the chimney remained, gaining mass and reality as Jack bore down upon it like a ship emerging from the front of a storm.

  Mr. Flip began to scream. It knew.

  It knew that this time there would be no escape from the splintering it would receive. It knew all along what Jack had only discovered—that it thrived only when Jack had finally let it back into the world. After forty years in the magic lamp of Jack’s id, success and ennui had eroded the seal. The monster was out of jail. Jack listened to its scream and threw back his head to join with it—a scream of unholy harmony.

  Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? All those years, Jack had been singing his song and not knowing it had been a duet. When his father obliterated Mr. Flip so long ago, the little boy who stood witness had done more than merely watch. Like the warriors of Borneo, he had absorbed his enemy totally.

  Jack smiled as everything fell into place.

  He ran with the abandon of a ten-year-old fueled by the elation of a childhood past unstoppered and pouring down the funnel of time. Nemmy had been so right; he realized it now, as he reached up to grab her charm in his fist, to hold it tightly through this final circuit of his journey. Bounding through the yard, cutting through the night, his hand burst upward to his throat in a miscalculated motion. The thin chain ruptured, sending the silver symbol into the darkness.

  For an instant, Jack felt everything locking up like a bad clutch. His hesitation leaked a message to the thing bunched under his arm and he felt it swell and pulsate like some diseased organ.

  What’s-a-matter, Jack-boy? No more magic twanger, eh?

  He almost stopped right before the image of the barbecue pit, to wonder if it could really be there, to question his own beliefs and needs. Nemmy…that silver trinket…

  The eidolon of his childhood twisted and blistered under his grip. It sensed that it could, after all, still be free of him. Free to mock him in his helplessness. Jack struggled to keep his psychic balance. He couldn’t let it get this far just to fall on his face, to let this thing crush him. He didn’t need any magic charms.

  (No. Fuck all that. I’ve got this little bastard right where I want him.)

  He could almost hear Nemmy’s voice in his head, Obi Wan to his Luke: use the Force, Jack.

  He threw back his head and laughed at the moon. (Talismans? We don’t need no stinking talismans!)

  He could feel the entity shrinking again under his grip. It was attuned to him, there was no doubt. It knew him and could read him with an expert rating. Jack was no longer surprised by this affirmation of his spirit. This thing had been encysted within his psyche.

  Running now, he swung the thing that had called itself Mr. Flip up over his head in a terrible arc, gaining speed and power as it curved down toward the ancient flagstone.

  Gonna get you, ja—

  A final, high-register wail dopplered from the thing as Jack drove it into the face of the magic chimney, the stones fashioned from his father’s hands. There was an explosion of light and heat. Then everything st
opped and reversed itself; the scream swallowed up in a larger implosion. The thing was yanked from this world, rattling down the rails of entropy, and the air itself snapped shut with a loud pop! to mark its exit, its transfiguration.

  Suddenly Jack was standing alone in the corner of his old backyard.

  Alone. Hands empty. No trace of the flagstone pit barbecue.

  No Mr. Flip.

  Not where you could see him, anyway.

  Drawing a breath, he became aware of himself once again. It was as if he’d blinked his eyes to find he’d sleepwalked to the edge of an abyss and awakened just in time. A calm held him like the doldrums, but there was no panic, no desperation in it. Rather, Jack felt a new purpose that coursed through him with the fire of sour mash whiskey, lighting him up like a ballpark scoreboard.

  Turning he looked up the length of the yard, traced in moonlight, to the house where everything had begun. Jack knew he could now leave its old comforts and far older fears. A cycle had been completed, a mythic transference achieved. A new beginning sparked amidst the ashes of an ending.

  R. Jackson Trent rediscovered the oldest secret of all our lives; the one most of us forget. He’d invaded the sanctity of childhood’s tomb, escaped with the treasures we always leave buried there.

  …and lived to tell about it.

  The next story was written for yet another HWA anthology, entitled Psychos to be edited by Robert Bloch (the associational appropriateness should be obvious to all but the most numbheaded among you…), but two things happened between the time I started writing it and the time I sent it in for consideration.

  One was the internecine war that flared up within the ranks of HWA in the early Nineties. I’m not sure how it even happened, but the earliest sparks of the eventual conflagration seemed to have started on a now defunct quasi-internet/ bulletin board/chat room system on GENIE, which was an early attempt at getting Us All Connected. As I recall it, HWA had this members-only area where everybody logged on and aired out opinions, ideas, suggestions, reviews, etc. It soon became sadly apparent that a lot of the participants, who would normally (i.e. in person, face-to-face) be polite, mannered, and respectful had suddenly become arrogant, aggressive, and in some cases libelous in the things they said about other members of the organization. It was weird to see the outrageous, inflammatory words of people you knew were sad sacks, wimps, and chess-club geeks jittering across your screen. They had assumed they were somehow invulnerable because they launched their verbal assaults behind barricades made from the cyber-ether and keyboards.1 The basic theme of it all was simple enough: the Old Guard of writers, the ones who were present at, and participated in, the creation of the HWA had made a fine mess of things, and deserved to be excoriated, humiliated, and if possible, decimated. The assault on the seasoned veterans went on for a few months, escalating to the point of getting libelous when attacking various candidates for office.