by Isla Morley
“Turn on the light!”
The beam finds its mark—a razorback. I am still trying to fathom why such a docile animal, known for being shy and therefore impossible to hunt, would be going against its nature to mount an attack on humans when, seconds later, the impact lifts me clear off my feet. The boar has run smack-dab into the shovel. It squeals and staggers off into the night.
“Mom!” Adam drops next to me.
I’m not gored to death. I get up and dust off my tail end. “I’m fine.”
“We have to get away from this place!” He looks behind him.
“It’s okay. It won’t be back.”
“What was it?” Adam can barely get the words out he’s shaking so much.
I position the shovel so he can’t see how bloodied it is. “A boar, is all.” What I don’t tell him is that boars never charge people.
My arms ache from the impact. My chest is so tight that my breathing has become a thin whistle. Every little noise startles me. Readying the shovel in the event of another onslaught, I tell Adam to follow me.
“I want to go back to the car.” Adam’s voice is shrill.
“We have to keep going.”
He turns on his heel and hurries the other way. “I don’t like it here.” I grab his arm, but he pulls away. “We’ve got to go back to the car and wait until someone finds us. That’s what Mister’s survival guide said to do.”
“Adam, we’ll never find our way back to the car!”
Five seconds is all it takes for him to disappear completely. Between us there might as well be an entire forest.
“Wait!” I chase him with a snippet of light.
After a footslog through mud and bushes, we finally emerge from the quagmire. The ground seems to have a little bit of an incline. The dense vegetation falls back, but walking again in the open only makes me feel more vulnerable. I offer Adam a handful of dry noodles, but he shakes his head. When I ask if he wants to rest, he mutters something incoherent.
The gentle rise turns into a serious incline. Adam’s convinced we came this way before. I only agree so we can keep going to the top of the rise where we will surely be able to see lights and set our course.
Unlike the ground level, there is not one bush or tree growing on the hill, only a carpet of moss that squeaks as we walk on it. Near the crest, Adam stumbles and falls. He won’t let me attend to the bloody gash on his shin. I look for the offending item. It’s all wrong—the roads, the derelict train, the strange signposts, the trees I do not recognize, the mangrove swamp—but nothing convinces me the world is up to no good quite as much as this: a half-buried Singer sewing machine. A few paces farther, at the top of the hill, the wind has blown the topsoil away. A host of other items poke up through the ground: a piano, a refrigerator, the base of a floor lamp jutting out like a leg, part of a wrought iron headboard thrusting through the dirt like a flower-bed fence. Loads and loads of pots and pans. No matter where I shine the light, household items are trying to break free of their grave. Whatever the reason for this burial mound of stuff, we shouldn’t be on it. We have to get far away from this place.
Adam moans and slumps to the ground as soon as I tell him this. I try encouraging him, but he responds with nonsense murmurings. “I want to go home,” he says. Shivers wrack his body. I’d carry him on my back if I could, but these rubber legs now can barely hold me up.
We’ve come to the end of the line.
I haven’t cried for so long I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have something shake a body so. I sob so quickly and so hard tears haven’t a chance to form. A dry, bone-rattling cry that is absolutely silent—this is how I cry. Looking out at the vast, beastly landscape below us, one without a single lamppost or porch light, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. To believe the world was waiting for me, ready to welcome my son with open arms, to make right all the wrong that has been done.
Another coughing spasm seizes me. This one will not let go. I double over, gasping for air as a deafening boom goes off beside me. A white flash streaks above us like a comet. I swivel around. Adam is reloading the flare gun. He fires again, and the sky is pelted with another burst of light, and then another. He is using up all the flares. “Get back,” he rages at the night. “Get back!” Adam has mistaken the heavens for some kind of assailant. With clouds shifting quickly across the sky, the moon appears to be blinking its disbelief.
Coughing, I scoot over to him and try to still the hallucination. He slumps into my lap.
The world seems to have drawn itself away. Hope of getting to Mama’s house has become, again, an impossible dream.
“ADAM? YOU AWAKE?” I shuffle out from under my blanket of carpet scraps and ignore the stiffness in my back to hurry to his side.
Curling up even tighter on the recliner, my boy pulls the torn green drape up over his head and mumbles for me to let him sleep. Where the drape would have been hanging is a veil of morning light. Its hem just touches the floor, rousing the dust mites. Corner by corner, the night dries up, leaving rings of murk on the walls.
When we stumbled upon the house in the middle of the night, we were grateful for its easy access, neither of us having the physical wherewithal to break down a door or bust a window. Because the place smelled of smoke, I assumed a fire had at some point driven the occupants away. The flashlight’s batteries had run down so there was no way to know otherwise. It is now clear that something else has caused the house to be abandoned.
Plaster has fallen from the ceiling and formed a chalky carpet on the buckled linoleum, the blue paint on the walls is in some places blistering and in others peeled all the way through to the framework, and yet, dusty personal effects are scattered throughout the room: a small silver tray of bobby pins and a comb next to it; reading glasses on a glass side table; a cordless telephone. I hurry to pick it up, not really surprised to find the line dead. The ceramic planter is empty, but a rubber tree has reached in through a broken windowpane and appears to be throttling the floor lamp. Two rusty chrome chairs are missing their seats; the chandelier hanging above where a table might have been is missing its lightbulbs. In the adjoining kitchen, heirloom china is still on a draining board, a yellow teapot on the stove, a faded dish towel folded neatly on the oven handle. Someone has left his pipe on the counter. A set of keys hangs from a wire rack next to the back door. Whatever it was that prompted the occupants to leave also insisted they hurry.
If there was any doubt before about the ordeals the house has suffered, there is none now—in the hallway, vandals have spray-painted the walls with illegible words, and on the open door a skull and crossbones. I step past the warning to greet the outdoors.
Instead of waiting for me on the porch, morning has raced up from the hills behind us, spread over the house, and is barreling toward the horizon. It has the clouds on the run, too, parting them like a foamy red sea. For more years than I care to count, morning has been the picture accompanying the April page of the calendar. Static is how I’ve come to think of morning, and here it is, chasing what’s left of the night, nipping at its heels. Everything comes to life because of morning. The trees shiver at the excitement, leaves scatter, even the old house creaks and groans, as though it is trying to pull itself up from its foundations to get a better view of the action. Morning has animated something in me, too, some dormant thing that for years has known only how to sit and wait. Get a move on, it says. Don’t let the day get away.
And yet it is hard to do anything but stand and stare. Just because you can see something doesn’t mean you can trust it to be real. The other senses are easily tricked, too. Breathing in the scent of lilacs or having your skin react to the damp breeze with gooseflesh is not enough. Someone else needs to confirm the experience. Adam needs to get up.
I walk back inside and give a startled cry at the vagrant behind the door. It’s an odd thing to mistake yourself for a stranger, an unfriendly one at that. I wipe the mirror for a better look. There are twigs and leaves in my d
irty braids, scratches on my face and neck. My dress, chosen long ago by Dobbs for its modesty, now has a huge slit running up the side showing a lean, bruised leg, and my cardigan has lost all but its top button. The shoes are a disgrace, what with my toes sticking out through the front. Top to bottom, it is a ghastly sight. I go back to the room where Adam is still sleeping and take from the suitcase my spare dress. With the comb and the bobby pins, I return to the mirror to establish some semblance of decency. On closer inspection, I notice that my skin is already responding to moisture; my face seems less parched. Lips are full once more, and without the tinge of blue. Preserved, is the word that comes to mind when I note how few wrinkles I have, and I wonder if I won’t wake up tomorrow with my due allotment and then some. When I am done, I look like someone to whom I am distantly related. I try out a smile. Not exactly a pretty picture, but not someone who will send children running and screaming either.
“Adam, wake up, son.”
He groans again, but this time I shake him until he sits up. He squeezes his eyes shut, then fastens his arm across his brow. “Agh. Turn it off. It’s too bright!”
“It’s sunlight, son. I can’t turn it off.”
“I can’t take it. Do something, Mom!”
Adam sits cross-legged, covers his head with both arms and begins making high-pitched feedback sounds. I race to the kitchen and get a plastic bowl from under the sink and then yank the lace curtain from the window. It is a struggle to get Adam to cooperate but eventually I have the bowl secured to his head with the lace, which, pulled down in the front like a veil, will hopefully provide some protection against the glare.
“Okay?”
Grudgingly, he gets to his feet, wrapping the green drape around him.
He refuses to let me check his wound but does accept the last of the dried noodles. He doesn’t seem to have a fever, and although a little unsteady, he’s in better shape than last night. After adjusting the bowl on this head so the veil hangs down to his chest, he presses an arm against his side and limps across the room. In the kitchen, he picks up a chipped enamel mug, a slotted spoon, a saucepan hanging from a rack above the stove. He carries them to the arched doorway. “What’s through there?”
I tell him it’s time to get a move-on, but he responds by walking into the hall. “Watch your step,” I warn him, just as a floorboard gives way under his foot. Adam rights himself, then continues past the tumble-down staircase into another front room.
Something scurries into the hole in a sooty wall where the paneling has been removed. Adam shuffles across the floor after it, sending shredded pieces of wallpaper into the air. I, though, approach the cause of the smoky smell: a bathtub in the middle of the room. In it are the charred remains of a bonfire and beside it a couple of balusters from the staircase. The house has not been vandalized. It’s being cannibalized. Someone is feeding the house, board by board, chair by chair, to the fire that happens in here. I notice the blackened pot. Small bones and some kind of paste are in the bottom of it. This was someone’s recent meal.
Not wanting to cause Adam any more alarm, I use a calm voice to tell him that we are leaving. I gather our belongings and meet him in the entry hall.
Adam looks like a tinker. He has fastened the pot, several more mugs, and utensils around his waist with his belt, all of which make a terrible din when he moves. He has also found a ball of twine, a jar of safety pins, and a dusty black umbrella. “What is it?”
“We have to go, Adam.”
He empties the pins into his pocket, hands me the twine, then pushes the little stainless-steel button on the umbrella’s shaft. The canvas pops open. Startled, Adam drops it, staggers backward, and loses his balance.
“It’s okay, Adam.” I help him up. Another clanging, banging ruckus. “It’s for when it rains. So you won’t get wet.”
He picks up the umbrella, examines its sharp tip, gives the air a few lancing blows, and then tests the mechanism that makes it open and close until he gets his fingers pinched for his troubles. “Do you think they’re going to come back for it?”
I shake my head. “Nobody’s coming back.” So much for promising never to lie to him again.
“Can I keep it?”
“We’ve already got too much to carry.” He gives me that look, so I shrug.
As soon as I turn the doorknob, he says, “I don’t want to go back out there.”
We both stare above us when something creaks. Probably just the wind. I look at Adam again. “It can’t be more than a fifteen-minute walk to the road. There’ll be cars going by right now. I know you’re exhausted, but we’ve got to go just a little bit farther.”
I offer him my hand. Instead of taking it, he turns the umbrella upside down on the floor and twirls it. “You can go.”
“Adam, we have to get you help.”
“You get help. I’ll stay here and wait.”
There have been so few occasions in which Adam has ever felt threatened that it takes me this long to cotton on to the fact that he’s terrified.
“Everyone’s scared of being outside when it’s dark, but it’s different in the daylight. It won’t be like it was last night, I promise. It’s wonderful, son. A thousand times better than your mural.” At the mention of this, he raises the umbrella so that it blocks his face. “I know this is hard for you. Just a little bit longer, that’s all I’m asking.”
“Everything hurts.” I can hear in his voice that he is close to tears.
It’s not just the wound, he tells me, it’s his feet, his legs, his back. His nose hurts from the cold air, and he’s got a sore throat, but worst of all is the headache that comes and goes depending on how much light there is. Out on that front porch, he says, is enough to split it in two.
Above us is another creak. I hold my hand out to silence him. A shutter banging in the draft, perhaps? But then, another creak, the kind that comes from bearing weight. Adam and I both stare at the ceiling. Creak-creak-creak. Not the scuffling of some feral creature, but footsteps. Definitely footsteps. With sudden clarity, I realize that the house is not abandoned, that those personal belongings set about the house still belong to someone.
Adam doesn’t need to be convinced. He pulls open the door and we are off the porch and down the stairs in a flash, pots and pans jangling.
Something large enough to cover us in a shadow blows overhead. Adam, leaning into the stiff breeze and limping quickly across the front yard to the meadow, puts up the umbrella only to have it snapped inside out. I look back, but the shadow has disappeared behind the house. What I do see stops me cold. Standing at a streaky window on the second floor is an apparition. Grandma, who was born with the caul, claimed spirits came in all shapes and sizes, just as the living did. Only difference was that light passed right through them. Whatever stands in the window is not what Grandma described, but it is no earthly being, either. The figure is charred as though from the furnaces of hell. It slowly raises its hand. It could be a wave or a signal to stop or it might be clearing the window for a better look at us. I don’t wait to find out. I tell Adam if he has it in him, now might be a good time to run.
* * *
With a clatter, Adam drops to his knees, panting. I would like to put more distance between us and the house. It’s impossible to calculate distances anymore. A mile, maybe two or three, is how far we’ve come from the house, not far enough to explain why the terrain has changed so dramatically. Instead of trees and shrubbery, we have stumbled onto what looks like a vast dry lake bed. The ground has the texture of sandpaper and is cracked in geometrical patterns like giant lizard skin. To our left is another imposing power-line tower. Following them means we are bound to stumble upon civilization sooner or later, even though it means dealing with Adam’s fear that they’ll tumble over and squash us to death.
“I can’t go any farther, Mom. I just can’t.”
“Oh, son.” I kneel beside him and push the umbrella aside so I can get a look at him. “Is it your wound? Has it sta
rted bleeding again?”
“Look what the air did to my umbrella.” Adam, clinging to its handle, seems to be in a tug-of-war with the wind. I help him position the canvas so the gust pops it back to its regular position, forming a bit of a break. He fingers its little broken rib. “What if we get separated? What if the air blows me one way and you the other?”
Kansas winds are known for stripping the land down to the bone, for tossing entire towns into the air. They can pick up and carry off rooftops, pluck telephone poles out of the ground and use them as javelins. There is nothing to be done if this turns into one of those winds. Nevertheless, I get out the ball of twine. I unravel it, and attach one end around his waist and the other around mine. “There.”
Instead of rolling his eyes at me, Adam checks the knots. He says, “There’s too much sky.” He pulls the umbrella over him and changes into a large black beetle. We sit like this for a long time, long enough for several plastic bags to stack up against us.
* * *
We are not any faster when we head out once more, but our progress is steady, thanks to the portable kiosk I constructed. Draped over the umbrella and secured with safety pins is the green curtain, parted just enough in the front to give Adam a sliver of a view. He is much more sure-footed now that he feels sheltered from the expanse above. I keep an ear tuned for traffic sounds, but what fills the air is the percussion of Adam’s souvenirs and the drone from a haze of gnats brazen enough to keep settling on us.
The breeze at our backs finally peters out, as though it no longer has the heart to run us off any faster than what we are already going. It’s fanciful to personify everything. The darkness last night; the wind now. Perhaps it’s having been deprived of living things for so long that I now can find no inanimate object. A stone trips; clouds cast judgment; a tumbleweed snickers at us as it rolls by. Tut-tut-tut goes the hard sand as we walk. And the odd shadow continues to stalk us, gaining ground.