Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  I didn’t answer. I sat there, silent, ashamed, until she huffed, angry that I’d managed to push her this far. And in the next instant she stormed out, shaking her head, as if she couldn’t believe she’d raised a son as ungrateful as I was.

  —

  The next day I drove over to Jarrod’s to pick him up for school like usual, now that the roads were clear and the blizzard was over. But when I arrived, instead of waiting for him, I turned off the Blue Bomb’s engine, went up to the door, and knocked until it swung open and Jarrod stood before me.

  “Is your mom home?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Working a double to make up for all the days off during the blizzard.”

  “Good,” I said, and stepped up to stand beside him in the doorway, our faces inches from each other. “Why don’t we skip school today? Horror movies and making out sounds better.”

  Jarrod laughed, as if he couldn’t believe what I’d just proposed. Then, when I didn’t laugh with him, he said, “What? Is my good boy turning bad on me?” When I only grinned in answer, his face changed to something more curious, and he said, “I thought you wanted to take things slow. To be careful.”

  “That blizzard,” I told him, “was sent here by someone or something, according to my mom. She’s the one who stopped it.”

  “Okay,” he said, waiting for me to go on.

  “So, you know,” I said. “That someone or something is apparently out to get my family. It seems we have enemies. Enemies who can conjure up blizzards. I figure I better not waste any more time, if something like that is really out there.”

  “Wait,” Jarrod said. “Are you saying—”

  But I didn’t let him finish. I put my hand over his lips for a second and said, “Horror movies and making out.” Then I removed my hand only after I’d leaned in to kiss away whatever question he’d almost asked me.

  I didn’t know the answer to that question anyway. I didn’t know much about anything, really—not nearly enough about my own family, not enough about the secrets my mother kept from me, not enough about myself or whatever else I might be capable of doing—but when I put my hand on his waist and pulled him closer, I knew exactly this one thing:

  Him and me. Together.

  At school, Jarrod and I shared smiles that held secrets. No one knew about us—not the us we were beyond those hallways and classrooms—and I figured that was probably how we’d continue to be, as long as we lived in Temperance. Or at least as long as we were in high school. But I was starting to understand that we could be who we were together, regardless of whether we stayed forever in a town as small and changeless as ours. If my mom decided to go psychic on me, though, and read those particular thoughts, she would disagree. She had always been a true believer in Temperance—she said the people here were the salt of the earth—but they would probably have been more like salt rubbed in a wound if they knew my and Jarrod’s secret.

  Small towns in remote corners of the world are really quaint, unless you don’t fit into them. Then they’re just small.

  I’d never really had a friend here, not like Jarrod. Or at least, I couldn’t remember any after my mom pushed them away from me, blocked them from seeing me, the same way she’d blinded me to the invisible world. The salt-of-the-earth people of Temperance my mom always defended had mostly treated me like I was invisible over the past five years, except for those times when I spaced out in class, thanks to my mom screwing my head up, and then I was all too visible and everyone got in a good laugh.

  When I thought about it—when I thought about it so hard my brain would start to tremble toward a migraine—I knew that if Jarrod hadn’t come home, I’d have been lost forever, aimlessly driving my car around town in circles, hoping I’d find my real life waiting just around the corner of this false one my mother had given me. I would have never found myself without Jarrod to help me remember that I wasn’t as thin as paper. To help me remember there was more to me than even I knew.

  I stopped telling myself that things would get better, like I’d been doing for weeks at that point. And I thought that was wise of me, considering the fast turn my life had taken into Seriously Weird Central. Now I told myself to get ready for whatever was coming next. Because things were coming—I could feel that the same way my mom felt things hours, days, weeks, or years ahead of time. Only these things were not good. Whatever was coming for my family was done playing with us. The next time it came, it would do its worst.

  In early January, my dad and Toby started gearing up for their last go at deer season. They did this every year, hunting together down in Marrow’s Ravine, where my dad and his father and grandfather had all hunted.

  My dad’s stand was a well-traveled route for deer—there was a buck or a doe each season, guaranteed meat in the freezer, another rack hanging on one of the walls of our house, if it was something special. And if you had an old man who had claimed a place that never failed to bring out the deer, you could count yourself lucky to inherit that place when his hunting days were over. That was how my dad got his place in Marrow’s Ravine, just a mile trek back through our woods and down a steep slope to the center of that forest.

  He’d inherited the spot from my grandpa John, the man whose eyes constantly followed me around our living room. When my grandma Bennie was still alive, living down the hall in the extra bedroom, I once asked her what he’d been like. “He was a shy fellow,” she’d told me. “Never did well talking to most people.” She smiled then, looking beyond my shoulder at the tree line behind the fields of clover in our backyard, and said, “That’s what I liked about him. He was all mine, when I had him.”

  This stand of his, this place that must have been a crossroads for deer in northeastern Ohio, had been handed down to him by his father, the man who had jumped out of an airplane on D-day, a man who had chased the white stag into the woods until he found death waiting for him in his own reflection.

  My mom and I were often alone those first two weeks of January. And as my dad and Toby drifted through the woods and crouched in tree stands, I started to ask her questions. Questions I hadn’t been able to ask when they were around because of my promise to keep her secrets. “Can you tell me more?” I asked one evening, before they’d come home from the woods.

  She was sitting in a wing-backed chair in the living room, reading something on her tablet. When I asked the question, she looked up and stared at me, blank-faced, possibly annoyed, before saying, “What is it you want to know?”

  “Whatever I need to know,” I said. “You can’t sit there and deny that something is out there looking for us. You’ve said so yourself. And besides, I’m putting things together on my own. Things are finding their way to me. Whether you’re going to help or not doesn’t matter.”

  She placed her tablet on the table beside her, then turned back to me with a pinched expression. “What things exactly are finding their way to you?” she asked, almost as if she didn’t believe me.

  “You gave me back the memory of the man in the black suit,” I said. “And I met the white stag in the world’s shadow. I watched my great-grandfather die. I watched Grandpa John over there shoot himself.” I turned to look at my grandfather’s portrait for a moment, met his eerie stare, then turned back to my mother. “There’s plenty coming to me. And I know there’s more. I just want to understand. I want to know how I’m a part of everything.”

  “I’ve already told you,” my mother said flatly. “The man in the black suit and the white stag are agents of Death.”

  “But…why? Why did I see them? Why not some skeleton wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a sickle?”

  “There are as many harbingers of death as there are different kinds of people in the world. They come in forms people have given them over the years, depending on how they see them. The white stag runs through your father’s family. Ironic, isn’t it, for a clan of hunters? It carried you home because you have Lockwood blood running through you. It recognized you. And when you die, yo
u’ll either be led across the way by the stag or by the agent from my family. Old Black Suit. Whichever one holds more sway with you will come.”

  “I want the stag,” I suddenly found myself saying.

  “Why?” my mother asked, cocking her head to the side, curious.

  “It didn’t seem as creepy as Old Black Suit.”

  “Old Black Suit,” my mother said, “may be unnerving, it’s true. But at least you can reason with him. The stag—well, let’s just say it’s the agent for your father’s family for a reason. Like the Lockwoods, the stag can’t be swayed beyond its purpose.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “for talking to me like this. I mean that.”

  Instead of saying you’re welcome, though, my mom simply pursed her lips before asking, “Is there anything else, then?” as if she were a sales clerk at a store counter.

  “You never told me how you stopped that blizzard,” I said, not letting her tone offend me, trying to press her for as much information as possible.

  My mom sighed and looked down at the tablet on the end table, as if she’d rather be reading. When she looked up again, she said, “It’s complicated, Aidan.”

  “Why can’t you just tell me what we’re dealing with?” I said, and I could hear my voice climb a little higher.

  “Because it will change everything I’ve done to protect you. It’s not possible. Just bear with me a while longer. I’ll fix things right, I swear.”

  “Then why don’t you start by teaching me what I can do?” I asked. I’d been burning to ask her for weeks now.

  “Aidan,” she said, “you don’t want to know these things. Trust me. Trust that I would put all of this down if I could.”

  She looked at the Christmas tree in the corner of the room then, at the strings of lights still glowing and the ornaments still hanging off the branches. “We should probably take that down,” she said, “shouldn’t we?”

  Another closed door, I realized. Another dead-end discussion. I could have continued to press her, but I knew by my mom’s tone that she was finished, that the only thing I’d get from her after this point was either going to be a moment of pretending to be close like we’d been when I was a little kid, taking down the tree, rehashing holiday memories, or else a heated, hurtful argument.

  So I nodded, agreeing to help take down the tree, agreeing to let her change the subject.

  I spent the next hour with her, removing the satin bulbs and gingerbread, the cords of lights and the ornaments constructed with toothpicks and Popsicle sticks—things Toby and I had made back in elementary school. That I had ever been so small, so young, so unknowing, was hard for me to believe. Where had all the time gone, and how did it go so quickly? Or had it gone anywhere? Had it instead taken on a particular shape? Had we somehow molded time into these childish ornaments with our tiny hands and stored it that way, held inside them?

  My mom had difficulty getting rid of things that had to do with her kids: photos, essays, finger paintings, athletic trophies, 4-H ribbons. So when I commented on how the ornaments we’d made as kids were shoddy and should probably be thrown away, she said, “One day you’ll want as many of these things as you can get.” And when I asked why, she said, “Because they’ll remind you of who you are when you forget yourself.”

  “I’ve already forgotten myself, though,” I said, and she looked at me through the branches like I’d just slapped her.

  A fight was about to break out, but I’d made a fair assessment of my life right then, I felt. Hadn’t she admitted to hiding memories from me? Hadn’t she avoided telling me more when I’d asked just an hour earlier?

  Before she had a chance to argue, though, the back door slammed open so hard it shook the entire house. A second later, Toby burst into the living room where we’d been plucking candy canes off the tree branches. His face glistened, his cheeks were flushed red, and his eyes were filled with terror. His lips trembled as he tried to speak, and when he finally got his mouth open, he shouted the words “He’s dead! Oh my God, Dad’s dead!”

  My mother didn’t panic when Toby burst into the room with those words spilling out of him; she didn’t lose one ounce of control. She simply put the candy cane she was holding back on the branch and said, “Calm down, Toby. What’s happened?” And when Toby was able to explain that our dad had fallen out of his tree stand and wasn’t moving, my mom went straight to the kitchen to call Sheriff Barrens to tell him about what might have occurred down in Marrow’s Ravine. There were a few tears in her eyes as she spoke, but her voice held steady. “Yes, well,” she kept saying, over and over. “Yes, well.” She finished the call by saying she was going down to the ravine to see about the truth of the matter, and that she’d meet him there. Sheriff Barrens must have told her not to go, though, because she said, “I’m sorry, but you know I have to do this.”

  While they spoke, Toby sobbed on the couch, hunched over, fists tucked into his armpits. He was wearing his orange camouflage snowsuit and hunting hat with furry ear flaps. The suit was covered in mud, as if he’d stumbled and fallen into water, making me think of our great-grandfather drowning in that creek in France. “Toby,” I said, “what happened?” But he only shook his head. Snot dripped from his nose, and no matter how many times I asked, he wouldn’t answer.

  I’d never seen my brother like this before. I’d never seen him so reduced, so afraid.

  When my mom came back from talking to the sheriff, she sat beside Toby on the couch and put her hand on his shoulder, gently, as if he might break, as if her touch would call him back to us. “You need to calm yourself,” she said, taking off his orange cap and pushing away the sweaty hair from his dirt-speckled forehead. “You need to calm yourself so you can take us back to your father. We need to find him. We need to help him right now.”

  “I can’t,” Toby spat through gritted teeth. “I fell halfway down the ravine when I went to check on Dad. I lost my phone in the fall or I would have just called you. I think I either twisted or broke my ankle.”

  “Show me,” my mom said, and Toby reached down, gritting his teeth harder, and his face turned an angry red color as he pulled the boot off.

  The flesh of his ankle was purple and swollen. My mom felt around it for a while, squeezing gently in different places, asking what he could feel and what he couldn’t, asking if he could move the ankle in certain ways. It reminded me of the jellyfish squish of bone I’d heard in my great-grandfather’s foot after he’d landed from his plane jump. When my mom was done, she looked up at Toby and said, “It’s not broken, I think, just badly sprained.” Then, turning to look up at me, she said, “Aidan, you’ll have to come with me.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “I can’t do it alone,” she said. “I need you to help me find your father.”

  Her tone was remarkably calm, but I’d never heard her say she needed me before, not like this, not with this carefully hidden dread in her voice.

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go, then.”

  “He’s not dead,” my mother said as soon as she closed the mudroom door behind us and the cold air began to fog around our warm bodies. I looked at her—bundled in a thick barn jacket and a black men’s stocking cap, a blue scarf twisted around the bottom half of her face—and could see the severe expression in her eyes that meant she wouldn’t allow any other idea to exist as we began to silently trudge through the snow a moment later.

  I listened to our boots crunch through the icy crust with each step that we took and tried to imagine a world in which my dad was no longer alive. It wasn’t possible. Toby had to be wrong. He had to be.

  After my mom and I had been trudging on like that for a while, lost in our own heads, I decided to finally break our silence.

  “How do you know for sure?” I asked, giving her a sidelong glance. “How do you know he’s not dead?”

  “Because,” my mother said, not missing a beat in her step. “I would have felt him leave this world. And besides, he’s been hidden,
protected.”

  “Protected from what?” I asked, but my mom just stared for a second like I’d said the stupidest thing in the world.

  I didn’t say any more. I kept my head down and pulled one leg in front of the other, over and over, punching through the snow. My breath came out in plumes as we pushed back through the frozen pasture, back through the ice-crusted lane that would take us into the woods.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked when we did finally reach the edge of the woods a while later, in the same place where, several months earlier, on a cold autumn night, the white stag had knelt down to let me slide off its back.

  “I have a general idea,” my mom said, “but I haven’t been down to Marrow’s Ravine in years. When’s the last time your father took you?”

  I thought about it for a second. The last time Dad had taken me down to Marrow’s Ravine had been a year ago, when I was a junior and he and Toby had been excitedly talking about going back to screw steps into their trees and climb into the branches to set up their stands. My mom had stood in the living room watching them gear up for the journey, and unexpectedly she’d suggested that my dad take me with them. “What for?” my dad had asked, looking from her to me like there was something wrong with both of us. “Aidan doesn’t hunt.”

  “Maybe he’d just enjoy the walk,” my mom had offered. “Maybe he’d enjoy seeing what you two see back there.”

  My dad had grudgingly agreed, nodding and chewing his bottom lip like he’d been forced to pick a not-so-likely classmate for a gym team. But I’d suited up quickly, not wanting to annoy him further, because he and Toby were already almost ready. Then we went back through the pasture and back through the woods, with the trees stretching up tall and dark around us, until we reached the edge of the ravine, a mile or so from our back doorstep. Then we climbed down the side of the ravine, using the spots where my dad’s and his dad’s and his granddad’s feet had worn a trail of steps into the earth over their decades of hunting, to find the tree my father would use for his stand. Toby’s place was on top of the ridge, where he could look down and see my dad at the bottom. The plan was, if a deer got past my dad, it would run up to the ridge, where it would think it was safe, and then Toby would have a chance to take it.