by S. T. Joshi
“Do you have back issues of the paper?”
“Newspaper?” she asks.
“Yes. There’s only the one, am I correct?”
“You are.”
“Do you have back issues?”
“We have microfiche,” and I tell her that microfiche is perfect. So she leads me through the stacks to a tiny room in the back. There’s a metal cabinet with drawers filled with yellow Kodak boxes. She begins to explain how the old-style reader works, how to fit the spools onto the spindles, and I politely assure her I’ve spent a lot of time squinting at microfiche, but thanks, anyway. I am always polite with her. I do ask for the reel that would include October 26th, 2001.
“You aren’t going to let this go, are you?”
“Eventually, I might. But not yet.”
“Ought never have come here. Can’t nothing good come of it. Anyone in town can tell you that. Can’t nothing good come of prying into the past.”
I thank her, and she scowls and leaves me alone.
I press an off-white plastic button, and the days whirr past my eyes. I have always detested the sound of a microfiche reader. It reminds me of a dental drill, though I’ve never found anyone who’s made the association. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone how they feel about the click-click-click whirr of a microfiche reader. One day soon, with so much digital conversation going on, I imagine there will be very few microfiche archives. People pretend that hard drives, computer disks, and the Internet are safer places to keep our history. At any rate, the machine whirs, and in only a minute or so I’ve reached October 26th, the day after the lightning strike. On page four of the paper, I find a very brief write-up of the event at the crest of the hill. One Tree, as it seems to be named, though the paper doesn’t give that name. It merely speaks of a house at the end of an “unimproved” drive off Middle Road, east of The Village. A house had recently been constructed there by a family hailing from, as it happened, The City. The world is, of course, filled with coincidence, so I make nothing of this. I doubt I ever shall. The house was to be a summer home. Curiously, the family is not named, the paper reporting only that there had been three members—father, mother, daughter—and that all died in the fire caused by the lightning. Firefighters from The Village had responded, but were (also curiously) said to have been unable to extinguish what must have been a modest blaze. I will only quote this portion, which I am scribbling down in my notebook:
Meteorologists have attributed the tragic event to “positive” lightning, a relatively rare phenomenon. Unlike far more commonly occurring “negative” lightning, positive lightning takes place when a positive charge is carried by the uppermost regions of clouds—most often anvil clouds—rather than by the ground. This causes the leader arc to form within the anvil of the cumulonimbus cloud and travel horizontally for several miles before suddenly veering down to meet the negatively charged streamer rising up from the ground. The bolt can strike anywhere within several miles of the anvil of the thunderstorm, often in areas experiencing clear or only slightly cloudy skies, hence they may also be referred to as “bolts from the blue.” Positive lightning is estimated to account for less than 5% of all lightning strikes.
The meteorologist in question is not named, nor is his or her affiliation given. I do find it odd that far more space is given to an attempt to explain the event than to any other aspect of it. Also, it appears to have been cribbed from a textbook or other reference source, and deviates significantly from the voice of the rest of the article. There is, reading over it again and again, the sense that explaining the lightning was far more important to whoever wrote the piece than was reporting the deaths of the family or even the general facts of the case. A single anonymous source is quoted, a resident of High Street (in The Village), as a witness to the lightning strike. There is also mentioned a “terrific booming from the sky” that occurred an hour after the strike, and I can’t help but wonder why the paper went to so much trouble to make plain that there was nothing especially peculiar about the lightning, but records another strange incident in passing which it makes no attempt to explain.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” the librarian asks, peering into the small room. I notice, for the first time, the room smells musty. Or maybe it’s the librarian who smells musty.
“I did,” I reply. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
“I do my job. I do what the town council pays me to do.”
“Then you do it well,” I say, determined to inflict upon her a compliment.
She grumbles, and I leave while she’s busy removing the spool and returning it to its yellow Kodak box. I step out onto the tiny courtyard in front of the library, and it’s just begun raining. Cold drops pepper my face. I stand, staring up into the rain, and consider calling the editor, apologizing, and asking for a second chance. Telling him there really is no mystery here, so it could be a great little piece debunking a rural myth, a triumph of science over the supposedly miraculous. I could return to The City, to my apartment, and wait for other jobs. I would find a way to forget about whatever lived at the top of the hill. I would tell myself I’d imagined the whole affair, mark it up to weariness, depression, something of the sort. The rain almost feels like needles.
6.
I AWAKE FROM A NIGHTMARE. I AWAKE BREATHLESS to sweaty sheets. I think I may have cried out in my sleep, but I don’t know for sure. Almost at once, I forget most of the particulars of the dream. But it centered on the charred tree. There was something coiled in the branches of the tree, or perched there. It was gazing down at me. A shapeless thing, or very nearly so, clinging somehow to those charcoal branches. I wanted to turn away, to look away, but was unable. It felt the purest spit spilling from it, flowing down the gnarled trunk and washing over me. I have never believed in evil, but the thing in the tree was, I knew, evil. It was evil, and it was ancient beyond any human comprehension. Some of the eldest stars were younger, and the earth an infant by comparison. Mercifully, it didn’t speak or make any other sound whatsoever.
I awake to a voice, and I recognize it straightaway. It’s the voice from the hill. Near the door, there’s the faintest of silhouettes, an outline that is only almost human. It’s tall, and begins moving gracefully across the room towards me. I reach to turn on the lamp, but, thankfully, my hand never touches the cord.
“Have you seen enough now?” she asks. “What you found at the library, was that enough?”
She’s very near the foot of the bed now. I would never have guessed she was so tall and so extraordinarily slender. My eyes struggle with the darkness to make sense of something I cannot actually see.
“Not you,” I whisper. “It hasn’t explained you.”
“Do I require an explanation?”
“Most people would say so.”
If this is being read, I would say most readers would certainly say so. There, I have said it.
“But not you?”
“I don’t know what I need,” I say, and I’m being completely honest.
Here there is a long silence, and I realize it’s still raining. That it’s raining much harder than when I went to bed. I can hear thunder far away.
“This is the problem with explanations,” she says. “You ask for one, and it triggers an infinite regression. There is never a final question. Unless inquiry is halted by an arbitrary act. And it’s true, many inquiries are, if only by necessity.”
“If I knew what you are, why you are, how you are, if there is any connection between you and the death of those three people…” I trail off, knowing she’ll finish my thought.
“… you’d only have another question, and another after that. Ad infinitum.”
“I think I want to go home,” I whisper.
“Then you should go home, don’t you think?”
“What was that I dreamt of, the thing in the tree?”
Now she is leaning over me, on the bed with me, and it only frightens me that I am not afraid. �
��Only a bad dream,” she sighs, and her breath smells like the summer forest, and autumn leaves, and snow, and swollen mountain rivers in the spring. It doesn’t smell even remotely of fire.
“Before The Village, you were here,” I say. “You’ve almost always been here,” I say. It isn’t a question, and she doesn’t mistake it for one. She doesn’t say anything else, and I understand I will never again hear her speak.
She wraps her arms and legs about me—and, as I guessed, they were delicate and nothing like the legs of women, and she takes me into her. We do not make love. We fuck. No, she fucks me. She fucks me, and it seems to go on forever. Repeatedly, I almost reach climax, and, repeatedly, it slips away. She mutters in a language I know, instinctively, has never been studied by any linguist, and one I’ll not recall a syllable of later on, no matter how hard I struggle to do so. It seems filled with clinks and glottal stops. Outside, there is rain and thunder and lightning. The storm is pounding at the windows, wanting in. The storm, I think, is jealous. I wonder how long it will hold a grudge. Is that what happened on top of the hill? Did she take the man or the woman (or both) as a lover? Did the sky get even?
I do finally come, and the smells of her melt away. She is gone, and I lie on those sweaty sheets, trying to catch my breath.
So, I do not say aloud, the dream didn’t end with the tree, I dreamt her here, in the room with me. I dreamt her questions, and I dreamt her fucking me.
I do my best to fool myself this is the truth.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
By dawn, the rain has stopped.
7.
I HAVE BREAK FAST, PACK, FILL UP THE NISSAN’S TANK, and pay my motel bill.
By the time I pull out of the parking lot, it’s almost nine o’clock.
I drive away from The Village, and the steep slopes pressing in on all sides as if to smother it, and I drive away from the old cemetery beside Lake Witalema. I drive south, taking the long way back to the Interstate, rather than passing the turnoff leading up the hill and the house and the lightning-struck tree. I know that I will spend the rest of my life avoiding the White Mountains. Maybe I’ll even go so far as to never set foot in New Hampshire again. That wouldn’t be so hard to do.
I keep my eyes on the road in front of me, and am relieved as the forests and lakes give way to farmland and then the outskirts of The City. I am leaving behind a mystery that was never mine to answer. I leave behind shadows for light. Wondrous and terrifying glimpses of the extraordinary for the mundane.
I will do my damnedest to convince the editor to whom I owe a story—he took my call this morning, and was only mildly annoyed I’d missed the deadline—that there is nothing the least bit bizarre about that hill or the woods surrounding it. Nothing to it but tall tales told by ignorant and gullible Swamp Yankees, people who likely haven’t heard the Revolutionary War has ended. I’ll lie and make them sound that absurd, and we’ll all have a good laugh.
I will bury, deep as I can, all my memories of her.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
The Man with the Horn
JASON V BROCK
Jason V Brock is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, composer, and artist, and has been published in Butcher Knives & Body Counts, The Devil’s Coattails, Calliope, The Bleeding Edge, Black Wings II, and many others. He was art director/ managing editor for Dark Discoveries magazine for more than three years, and has a new magazine out called [NameL3ss]. As a filmmaker, his work includes the documentaries Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, The AckerMonster Chronicles!, and Image, Reflection, Shadow: Artists of the Fantastic. He loves his wife, Sunni, reptiles/amphibians, and vegan-/vegetarianism.
1.
HE’S LEAVING…
She always knew when he was heading out. Shortly after he stopped practicing, there would be a great deal of commotion and shuffling on the other side of the thin old walls of the flat, as though someone were moving heavy fixtures around. A few minutes later, she would hear the muffled creak of his front door, and then the decisive slam as it closed. A moment or so after that, she could just make out the faint groan of the aging main staircase as he lumbered down to the gated front entryway.
In all the years she had lived in the modest little studio, she had never seen his face or spoken to him. All the other neighbors on her floor were affable enough; during the holidays, ancient Mrs. Kriteman would leave a tin of fresh-baked goodies in her doorway, or cranky Mr. Golding would brusquely offer to carry a heavy sack of groceries up to her place. Even Juan, the middle-aged handyman, was unfailingly polite, in spite of his limited English-speaking skills.
Not so her neighbor, Mr. Trinity.
In her twelve-year occupancy, she had yet to meet anyone who had associated with him in a social way, or even spoken with him; he was shadowy, mysterious, aloof.
Once, about five years ago, she managed to catch a glimpse inside his apartment as she was coming up the ramshackle stairs to their gloomy, worn landing. What little she could see appeared spartan, the walls painted black. There was the suggestion of weak lighting, and she just saw a strange endtable with an unusual statue on display. Without her glasses, it was hard to make out, much less comprehend, what she was viewing, and it was only a glance before the door closed, slamming loosely in its paint-chipped frame as he slipped back into his dwelling—as usual, his instrument case in hand, a battered hat pulled down to his jacket collar, his long, shapeless overcoat rustling. She noted then that he seemed a rather tall individual, but had only ever seen him in his duster and hat, and always from a distance. In the protracted silence that followed, the entire odd scenario raised questions in her mind about her neighbor… questions she had put out of her thoughts for some time, but which came rushing back, inspiring in her a vague sense of dread and disquiet concerning his circumstances, and her proximity.
In the ensuing years since, a lot had happened: Her mother had passed on from a prolonged bout of cancer… her brother had been killed in a terrible workplace accident… and she had been relegated to filling her empty hours volunteering at a homeless shelter, existing off the meager disability income she received each month due to a persistent and excruciating neck injury acquired from a car accident. After that she stopped driving, which she deemed not only hazardous, but unnecessary in the neighborhood, and especially as she had no other local relatives; moreover, walking was good exercise. At times she felt isolated, even in her building—an interesting, historic old brownstone with a mix of renters and owners, mostly the elderly and young families starting out—which could be disheartening, but it was an existence of sorts, and at her age, in her physical condition, it was all she could manage. If only she still had Tom, life would be mostly agreeable, but that was not the case: He was taken suddenly three years previous, victim of an undiagnosed heart condition. He fell asleep and just never woke up. For a time, she prayed for a better life, but her experiences had blunted her faith, lowered her expectations; one should be careful what one prays for, and to whom, she had decided, because there was no guarantee that any of it would come to pass… or in any way that was worth having. No more angels and devils for her; the inspiring tales of faith and redemption of her youth had long ago decayed into bitter cynicism and hard-won, biting realism, which she had come to appreciate. For too long she had held the wrong priorities and only valued what she actually had in hindsight. She recalled a long-forgotten acquaintance once telling her that the biggest downside to getting older was that everyone around you—friends, family, pets—died; that it was the tax paid on living a long life. Considering the other option, she supposed it was better to age, if she could manage it without too much pain and with some measure of decorum. As she approached senior citizen status herself now, she saw the wisdom and sadness of that observation and mentally calculated additional, personal fees: aching joints, failing eyes, lost hope. In her estimation, hearts only served a few purposes at this life stage—heart attacks, heartbreak, heartache.
Then, the nightly ritual commenced: Mr. Trinity’s door slammed shut. This was followed shortly by a heavy scraping sound emanating from his side of the drafty apartment wall. After a moment, he started playing, and his practice would go on for the next several hours. Building in intensity, the tenor of his instrument was mournful, the melody a wailing dirge—a cacophonous mélange of cawing, rasping, weeping shrills and squawks—which seeped through to her, filling her head, filling the night, filling the world with its anguished, doom-laden call….
2.
AFTER SO MANY YEARS, SHE HAD LEARNED TO TUNE out the ominous music issuing from the residence next door. Undeniably, she and Tom had obtained the unit—now paid for with Tom’s life insurance policy, another example of his taking care of her even in death—for a great price because of Mr. Trinity. No one else had wanted to purchase the abode once they heard the uncanny music wafting through the place from next door. The music, and the unnerving history of the domicile, were more than enough to spook most potential homeowners, in spite of the charming layout, the attractive arched doorways, and the decent square-footage. As a result, the apartment had remained on the market for over four years.
“THE PREV IOUS OWNERS SIMPLY DISAPPEARED,” THE REAL estate agent said. A decent-looking dirty blond, which he had apparently been told a few times too often, he smiled at her before opening the front door with a minor flourish. “Take a look!”