Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  “It’s been over a year,” I told my mom. “I’ve never come back here in winter, not since I was a kid and Toby and I used to play down there sometimes.”

  My mom brushed a strand of windblown hair out of her face as we pushed farther into the woods. “We’ll have to keep our eyes open, then,” she said. “These eyes”—she pointed back and forth between our eyes with two fingers—“and this eye too,” she added, pointing from her forehead to mine.

  We drifted for what seemed like forever, lost in a vast white desert where none of our eyes seemed to do us any good. After a while, my mom seemed to be on the verge of giving up hope. I could tell she was worried that my dad’s condition was getting worse, that every second that passed made it more likely he would slip out of his body and leave this world behind him. I could see her thoughts as she formed them, as if they were no more than strands of yarn, a cat’s cradle inside her mind instead of strung between her fingers. Usually my mom had all kinds of shields up to guard her thoughts and feelings. Now, though, with her attention focused on my dad, seeing into her mind was like looking through a pane of glass.

  We stumbled through snow-laced underbrush, licking our chapped lips, blinking ice out of our eyes, until finally I found a set of deer tracks, a pair of holes punched through the snowy crust. And there were flecks of blood in the snow too, as if maybe the deer had been hit, and the tracks remained, as if no amount of snowfall could erase them. I looked up from the tracks, turned in the direction they came from, and for a moment I thought I saw a deer running toward me, as if it were charging right at me. I startled as it came at me, jerked to the side a little, but before it could reach us, it broke apart like smoke and I could only hear the ghost of its hoofbeats as it passed, drumming and drumming as it ran in the direction of the farm.

  “Did you see that?” I asked, turning to my mom.

  She shook her head, squinted at me for a second. “What did you see?” she asked.

  I didn’t want to tell her I’d seen a ghost deer, that I’d heard its hooves as it ran past. If it was the white stag, it might be a sign that things were bad for my dad. So I told her I’d seen a glow coming from up ahead, that it might be where sunlight broke through the woods because the ravine widened and separated the tree canopy. She nodded and said that sounded like a smart idea, and from there I took us in the direction the deer tracks came from. Clutching her coat tight near her neckline, my mom let me take the lead. And after another twenty minutes, we’d done it. We’d reached the ridge that looked over Marrow’s Ravine.

  I could see my dad from that high up, even through the snow flying in my face, even through the branches of the trees that sprouted up on this side of the ravine. He was facedown in the snow, one arm flung out at an odd angle, and the falling snow had already begun to cover him.

  My mother gasped, then covered her mouth with her hand while tears formed and streaked down her wind-chapped face. She put her other hand on my shoulder to steady herself. “You did good,” she said without looking at me, without removing either hand from where it had settled. Then, after she caught her breath, we began the climb down.

  On the way, I kept wishing that I had stopped my mom from bringing me with her. I kept wishing that I’d called Jarrod and asked him to come over. Right now, he could be holding me as he told me none of this was really happening, that what I was about to face when I reached the bottom of the ravine was all in my head. I wanted him to tell me that I was crazy. Crazy, at that point, would have been preferable to the reality in front of me.

  But my wishing was futile. I didn’t know how to wish something into or out of existence. My mother had refused to teach me. So instead, I found myself holding my mom’s hand, helping her pick her way down the side of the ravine. It felt like I was watching it all happen from outside my own body, like it had felt when I’d fallen into the world’s shadow and watched my great-granddad fall through the air over a French battlefield. My breath came faster, then harder, and steam poured out of my mouth like smoke from a stack. I could hear my own heartbeat as we reached the bottom, and I could hear it stop for just a moment, skipping a beat when we came to stand next to my father.

  We found him almost directly below his tree stand, his rifle emerging from a crust of snow a few feet away, his shape still visible, like the curves of a body beneath a white sheet. A trickle of blood had leaked from his mouth and was frozen against his bristly jawline. And when I saw the blood, I let out a gasp like my mother had when she’d seen him from above. My breath curled away in wispy tendrils as reality settled inside me like a dark seed, one that would take root and grow a black and thorny vine around my heart in the days to come.

  It was then that I noticed that the tracks I’d followed to the ridge were down here too, around my father’s body. It looked as if the deer that had made them had found him before we did, had circled him, sniffing, trying to make sense of the human at the bottom of the ravine, the steam lifting from his body. There was a trail of blood in the snow between the hoofprints, a thread of red leading away from the spot where my father lay motionless. My mother didn’t seem to notice it, but I saw it clearly. It led up the side of the ravine in the direction we’d come from and was surely the blood I’d seen half a mile back.

  My mom bent down to place one hand on my father’s shoulder, but her legs gave way beneath her and she fell to her knees in one fast motion. She let out a short, sharp moan then, and touched the back of my dad’s head. “Oh,” she whispered, shaking her head, trying to deny what lay in front of her. “Oh, my love, we had time left. I was saving it up. I had heaps and heaps of time saved for us.”

  We stayed for a while like that, my mom kneeling in the snow next to his body, my head bowed as if I’d found myself in a vision, silent, unable to participate in the events going on around me. Eventually my mom looked up with her mouth open, her lips trembling, as if for the first time in her life she didn’t know what to say.

  “We have to go,” she managed to say. “We have to go back so we can get him home before nightfall. I won’t leave him out here like this.”

  The walk home felt longer, and slower, especially having to climb the side of Marrow’s Ravine instead of picking our way down. I held my mother’s hand most of the way up, leading her to the safe places to plant her next step, and eventually we reached the top, exhausted both by the climb and by the constant awareness we had to maintain on our way up. I could see how easy it would have been for Toby to stumble and fall, especially thinking that our father was dead or dying. He was lucky, really, that he’d done nothing more than sprain his ankle badly.

  We followed our own tracks back through the woods in silence. Every now and then, I’d try to catch a look at my mom with a sidelong glance, and her face was always hard, red, and angry. She looked like she might tear a bear limb from limb if one happened to cross our path. I almost hoped we’d run across the sheriff on our way back, just so I wouldn’t be alone with her in her barely contained rage. But he was nowhere in sight, so I stayed quiet as we trudged back through our own footprints.

  Until we came to the place where I’d noticed the deer tracks—tracks my mother hadn’t been able to see when we’d gone back to find my father. Tracks she still couldn’t see as we returned. Tracks with the trail of my father’s blood winding between them.

  Then she stopped suddenly and turned to me with that angry red face and said, “You saw something here, didn’t you?”

  I shook my head, not wanting to make her angrier than she was already.

  “Yes, you did,” she said, nodding, trying to encourage me now with a softer tone to tell the truth. “Tell me, Aidan. What did you see when we were on our way down there?”

  “A deer,” I admitted. “A deer like a ghost. It just came right through here, then disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

  “The stag?” she asked.

  “It was fast,” I said. “It didn’t seem as real to me as when I’ve seen it in the world’s shadow. But it could ha
ve been. It happened so quickly.”

  My mother looked around, trying to pierce the veil of the present into the past, to see what I’d seen. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand why you would see that and I wouldn’t.”

  “It might have been nothing,” I said. “It could have been entirely random.”

  I put my hands in my armpits to signal that I was cold standing there, to see if I could get her moving again, but she didn’t budge. Instead, she stared at me hard for a long moment. And then she said, “Don’t keep things like that from me, you hear?”

  And in a moment of complete exasperation, I said, “Why not? You keep things to yourself. You hide things from all of us.”

  She breathed out of her nose heavily then, squinting at me like I was a stranger who had offended her. Clearly I’d become one of those children whose parents look at them one day and suddenly realize they’ve become their worst enemies.

  “If you see things that I can’t,” she said a second later, “I need to know what they are, or we may never get to the bottom of this. Whatever happened to your father doesn’t feel like a simple accident to me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and stood there, not knowing what else to say, afraid to say anything. Afraid that I might choose the wrong word. A word that might attract whatever had killed my father. At least, I thought, she was giving me a rationale with her orders. Much better than how she usually responded when questioned. That’s for me to know and for you to find out. Maybe, I thought, we could work together, if she could just see me, if she could recognize me as an adult.

  “Okay,” I said again, nodding. And then we continued our trek home.

  When we finally reached the house, we found Sheriff Barrens waiting with Toby, and after we made arrangements for the sheriff to go back and bring my father home, I called Jarrod.

  “Did you know this was coming?” he asked on the phone.

  “No,” I said. “Neither did my mom. She swore she’d know if my dad had died, but she didn’t.”

  “If one person in the world would know something like that,” Jarrod said, “it’d be your mom. I’m sorry, Aidan. I don’t know what to say. Can I do anything?”

  “You can come over,” I said, thinking of the wish I’d made earlier, the wish that would have erased this day and left me sitting on my bed with Jarrod, him holding me, telling me everything would be okay.

  “I’ll borrow my mom’s car” was all he said before disconnecting.

  When Jarrod showed up twenty minutes later and rang the bell, my mom reached the door before I could. And when she opened it and found him standing on her front porch with his hands in his pockets, his mouth hanging open a little because he’d expected me to answer, she said, “Why are you here?” as if he might have done all of this, as if he had caused my dad’s fall. And all Jarrod could say was how sorry he was for her. How sorry he was for all of us.

  “I asked him to come over,” I said from the landing between the first and second floors.

  My mom turned to look up at me. Her face was white, as if all the blood had drained out of her in the last few hours, and her mouth was open in surprise, like Jarrod’s. When she looked away from me and back at Jarrod, she mumbled, “You were the only one. The only one who wasn’t a part of the story.”

  “Excuse me?” Jarrod said.

  My mom walked away, though, shaking her head, leaving the door open and Jarrod standing on the front porch with his black stocking cap pulled down over his ears and the snow falling gently around him.

  I shook my head as she walked out of the foyer into the living room, where she’d built a fire. She’d been staring into the flames since Sheriff Barrens left, as if the orange and red licks charring the logs might hold the answers she wanted. “Come on up,” I said to Jarrod after she was out of sight, and I waved him toward me.

  When Jarrod came into my room with me, he closed the door gently and said, “What did your mom mean back there? About me being the only one who’s not part of the story?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, unable to believe how rude she’d been, and for no apparent reason. “She’s been like this since we found him. She’s not making much sense right now.”

  “That’s understandable.” Jarrod pulled his arms out of his coat and hung it on the back of my door, then came over to sit with me on my bed, just like I’d wanted, and we leaned back against the headboard together. He put one arm around my shoulders and squeezed me close, put his chin on top of my head, kissed my hair softly. “How about you?” he said. “How have you been?”

  “It wasn’t just an ordinary accident,” I said immediately.

  “What do you mean?”

  I still saw the trail of blood leading away from my father’s body, that thin red ribbon. It had wound up the side of Marrow’s Ravine and through the woods, a crimson thread on the snow. The thread my father had left for me to follow, I’d already decided, the thread that would lead me to discover who, or what, had killed him.

  “I want to go with you,” Jarrod said after I told him what I was going to do.

  “I don’t think you can, actually.”

  “Why not?” he said, pulling back to look me in the eye, to challenge me a little.

  “Because,” I said, “I think the trail is going to lead me somewhere you can’t follow. Somewhere not here. Somewhere not in this world.”

  “Then I don’t want you to go there,” Jarrod said, squeezing me tight again, as if he might weigh me down and keep me on this earth if he just held on to me.

  I buried my face between his neck and shoulder, felt the heat of his skin against my face, kissed him gently on his collarbone. And when I looked up, I said, “I don’t think either one of us has a choice. I have to do this. And you have to let me.”

  Three days later, this would happen:

  After the calling hours, after the funeral, after a couple of my father’s friends from the roads department and one of his hunting buddies took up the handles of the casket with me and Toby, after my dad was lowered down into the earth, after my mom and Toby and I had deliberated over whether we would actually toss our handfuls of dirt on top of his casket, eventually letting the clods drop and watching his casket then be covered over with flowers, I went back to the woods again, back to follow the trail of my father’s blood.

  His figure was still etched into the snow where he’d fallen, as if it were a permanent feature in the landscape now, and I knew it would always be there when I looked at the base of his tree in Marrow’s Ravine, knew that where he’d fallen would forever be a marker of his absence. I stood there for a while, staring into the void his body had made in the snow, and wished that I’d never promised my mom I’d keep secrets from him. Secrets about myself that mattered. Now he was gone, and he’d never have a chance to know the real me. Never.

  Back home, my mom was sitting at the dining room table with a white candle lit in front of her, like I’d seen in a vision while we ate at that table as a family a few months earlier, before I could understand the things I’d begun to see and hear. She was searching the world beyond this one, trying to locate my father, wanting to make sure he was okay, trying to find answers. She’d been looking for him since we’d found his body, but she hadn’t been able to find his spirit in the days that followed. “Where is he? Where has he gone?” she kept muttering, even in front of Toby, who she’d asked me not to talk to about things like voices and visions. Now, it seemed, all of her rules were broken, and she was the one breaking them.

  We’d gotten into a fight before I left that morning to head back to Marrow’s Ravine. I was shrugging on my coat while she sat there, clutching her father’s silver pocket watch like it might be a cross or a string of prayer beads, looking like a zombie as she stared into the flame of her candle. “You said not to bring up things like what you’re doing around Dad and Toby,” I told her.

  “Hush,” she said without looking away from the candle. Just that.


  “You always hush me,” I said, continuing to push the issue. “You always tell me to keep quiet.”

  “I asked you to not say anything to them for your own protection,” my mother spat.

  “Well, that didn’t work out for anyone,” I said, “did it?”

  My mom slowly turned away from the candle to give me a fierce stare. “What are you trying to say here, Aidan?”

  “I’m saying you made me promise not to tell Dad about what was happening, for our own good, but he died anyway. And now he’ll never know me. Not the real me. Not the me you hid from everyone.”

  “Aidan,” she said. “Something outside of my control is happening here. You can’t blame me for that.”

  “Maybe you never had any control to begin with,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have ever trusted you after I found out how much you lie.”

  Then I turned and left, slamming the back door behind me.

  My mother had gone blind to the invisible world, apparently. She couldn’t contact my father’s spirit. She couldn’t see the thread of blood I’d seen back in the woods when we’d found my dad’s body. Now I knew that the invisible trail had been left there just for me. A secret message written in blood for one particular set of eyes to see.

  From the place where the thread started, where my father’s blood had leaked from his mouth after the fall, I began to follow the trail back up the side of the ravine, back through the woods to the place where I’d first found hoofprints. And from there I followed the thread as it unspooled further, leading me back to the edge of the woods, back through the lane to the pasture, where suddenly the thread veered in a wide arc and I followed it over the railroad-tie bridge that spanned Sugar Creek, until finally it disappeared into the hole at the bottom of the Living Death Tree.