Metamorphosis

by James P. Blaylock

  He forced himself to turn away now, and walked into his parents’ bedroom, wondering whether the answer he sought wasn’t simply another variety of question, or something worse. His mother’s wooden jewelry box sat on her dresser. She had been buried with her wedding ring, but there were other valuable pieces in the box—a bracelet with diamonds and emeralds, a ruby ring, a strand of pearls, gold chains with pendants. It came into his mind to keep something, but he found that he didn’t have very much nostalgia for leftover things, and that he didn’t need a piece of jewelry to remember his mother. The jewelry, like the rest of the stuff in the house, merely reminded him of what had passed away.

  He shut the jewelry box and left the bedroom, opening the door to the den. A row of glass insulators stood on the windowsill, purple with exposure to the sun, although the window shade was drawn now. He opened the shade and then the window. There was thunder again, closer now, rumbling for a long time before it was still. He smelled ozone rising from the concrete outside, as if rain was imminent, and he saw what appeared to be a flicker of light within the house across the street, beyond the nearly closed curtains. Almost as soon as he saw it, it vanished. Probably it hadn’t come from within the house at all, but was merely a reflection of the setting sun through a momentary break in the clouds.

  He moved across to the desk, which was empty aside from a dusty crystal paperweight that doubled as a magnifying glass. It lay atop a newspaper clipping that Michael saw was an obituary. The desktop around the rectangle of newsprint had been dusted, as had the window ledge and the insulators and everything else. He moved the magnifying glass and picked up the clipping, which was evidently old, the paper yellowed and dry. The name was unfamiliar to him: Madeleine Cummings. She had lived on this very street and had died young and unmarried forty ago, survived by a niece. He returned the clipping to its place on the desk and laid the magnifying glass back over it, exactly covering the clean circle of newsprint where it had been. He considered the puzzling fact that the room had obviously been neatened up—that the entire house was clean. His mother had spent some time on it prior to her death, and not hastily, either, although she obviously hadn’t touched the magnifying glass or the newspaper clipping, but had cleaned around it.

  The cubbyholes at the back of the desk held nothing but old envelopes, Christmas cards stacked in niches, pens and pencils in a beer mug, and a metal bowl with an Egyptian Pharaoh painted on it, the bowl holding paperclips and other desk debris. He opened drawers and looked inside, finding old issues of Popular Mechanics magazines and an out of date telephone book. The files in the file drawer held product warranties and instruction manuals to garden and garage tools—things that his father had found important before he lost his interest in the world.

  He picked up the paperweight again along with the clipping and started to reread it, but was interrupted by a knock at the front door. In the living room, he looked through the window onto the porch, where the next-door neighbor stood holding a handful of mail. He remembered then that her name was Beverly, although he had only chatted with her once a couple of years back. She was an old timer in the neighborhood and lived alone.

  “It’s Michael, isn’t it?” she asked when he opened the door. It was dusk outside now, the streetlights on. She was older than he recalled, but apparently there was nothing wrong with her memory for names. “I’ve got a few days of mail. Mostly junk, but a couple of bills…”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I stopped the delivery, so there shouldn’t be any more.”

  “There was nothing yesterday,” she told him. “And Tuesday’s Pennysaver day, so there would have been.”

  He slipped the paperweight into his pocket and took the mail from her. “I was sorry about your mother,” she told him. “She went through a lot, you know, with your father’s health and all. More than we can imagine.”

  He nodded. “It was a shock when she passed away,” he said. “I didn’t know there was anything wrong, or I would have been here.”

  “None of us knew,” she said, gesturing in the general direction of the street. “I wanted to tell you that.”

  “Thanks for saying so,” he said. “I can’t help but wonder, though.”

  “There’s no profit in wondering. Not now.”

  He let that one go.

  “I mean that a person has to move on after a death,” she said. “You can’t let the past take hold of you.”

  Abruptly he thought of the newspaper clipping, and he held it up. “I found this in the den just now,” he said. “Did you ever know…” He looked at the paper. “Madeleine Cummings? For some reason there’s a copy of her obituary lying out on my father’s desk.”

  “Oh, that was years ago,” she said. “Shortly after Warren and I moved in. We didn’t know her, really. No one in the neighborhood did. She kept to herself. She died young, and lay there in her bedroom for a long time before her niece found her. The house was in probate for what seemed like years, but eventually it went to the niece, who lived there for a couple of years, but then moved out without saying anything to anyone. There were renters a couple of times, fly-by-nights, but the house has been empty more than its been lived in. It was empty when your parents moved in. I suppose the niece is holding on to it as an investment, although I wish she wasn’t letting it run down. That’s senseless.”

  “I guess I was just wondering why the obituary would be lying around on the desk,” he said, giving it one last try.

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “I can’t imagine where it would have come from, it having happened so many years ago. Unless it was left in the house when the Sloanes separated. It could have been, I suppose. They’d been there long enough to have had a copy. Mrs. Sloane—Betty—left Bob pretty suddenly. I guess you really never know why things fall apart. You wouldn’t have guessed it would happen, though, if you knew them when they were younger. He was gone from the house a few weeks after his wife left. I remember your mom and dad piling some pieces of furniture in the carport for a couple of months and then selling it at a yard sale. That’s where we first got to know each other, really, at that sale. I brought a few things out of the kitchen and set up a table.”

  “That must be it,” he said. “The Sloanes. So nobody’s living over there now?” he asked, nodding at the empty house.

  She shook her head. “I wish there were. But I’m talking too much. You’ve got things to do.”

  “Thanks for bringing over the mail,” he said, “and for being a friend to my mother. I appreciate it.”

  “I wish I could have been a better friend to her.”

  “I wish the same thing,” he said truthfully, and just then it began to rain, enormous, widely spaced drops and the nearby reverberation of thunder.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “There it comes. I’ll leave you to it.” She turned and went down the steps, hurrying across the lawn through the rainy darkness toward her own house. He closed the door and tossed the mail onto the chair, but continued to stand at the window, watching the abandoned house, where there was once again a light, too late, now, for it to be a reflection of sunlight. It was apparently shining inside one of the back rooms. It seemed to wax and wane with the rainfall, although clearly that must be his imagination at work. But once the idea came into his mind, he began to dwell on it, watching as the wind came up, thrashing through the palm fronds. The rain came down more heavily again, and way back in the darkness of the house the light shimmered on and seemed to spread, as if the voltage were slowly being increased. And then after a time the rain faded to a drizzle, the light in the abandoned house fading with it.

  He lay the clipping on the chair with the mail and went out, hurrying across the street and up onto the walk to the front porch, where he was half hidden by darkness and shrubbery. There was a small glass window in the front door, but it only afforded a view of an entry hall with an umbrella stand. It seemed to him that he could see a faint aura of light along the inner edge of the hall, and he put his hand on the door
knob. Of course it was locked. He moved back along the front window to get a better look past the edge of the curtain, trying to remain out of sight from the street, and he glanced over at Beverly’s house. Her curtains were drawn across the windows.

  There was the heightened sound of rain behind him again, and the smell of wet and rotted vegetation, and he realized that the wind was blowing the warm rain up onto the porch, soaking the paper flyers and leaves and throwaway newspapers that littered the concrete. He wondered what he was doing there—why he had bothered to cross the street at all. He thought of his father, sitting in his chair, waiting for the rain and watching the street, going out into the evening when his mother was away. And now he was doing the same thing, knowing that his interest in this was more than mere curiosity. Let well enough alone, he told himself, but right then the light inside, apparently in a back bedroom, glowed again, more brightly than it had before, as if drawing energy from the rain, or, he thought uneasily, from the attention that he was paying it.

  He pulled on the edge of the window frame, unsuccessfully trying to slide the window open. It tipped just a little at the top, though, as if it weren’t locked, but was merely painted shut along the sill. He banged his fist hard into the bottom of the frame half a dozen times, working his way along the sill and feeling the paint crack loose. He rattled the window and yanked on it, working it open a couple of inches, pulling leaves and debris out of the runner before forcing it farther along. When the opening was wide enough, he climbed through, working the window closed behind him to hide the fact that he had just broken in. There would be no way to explain it to anyone if he were caught, he realized. He wasn’t sure he could explain it to himself.

  He left the window open and stood still, listening hard, and for the first time it came into his mind that there might be someone here. But the light didn’t seem to him to be associated with human activity, and he could hear nothing aside from rain against the roof shingles. Still, he had found it easy enough to get in….

  The house smelled dusty and closed-up, and there was the faint odor of mould, as if the roof or the plumbing were leaky. Away to his left there was an arched doorway into what looked in the semi-darkness to be a kitchen. Ahead lay a hallway, the layout very much like his parents’ house, with bedrooms and a bathroom off the hall. He stepped as quietly as he could into the hallway, and saw that the light was glowing steadily now, in the room at the end. The door stood open. He could see the foot-end of a bed and part of an upholstered armchair, its mahogany arms glowing faintly. The light reminded him of fireflies, or of a candle, but not wavering like a candle flame.

  Say something, he told himself, but the thought of speaking seemed alien to him, and he stood for a moment with his mind empty, neither willing to go back out through the window nor ahead down the hallway.

  He became aware of the heft of the paperweight in his pocket, and he wrapped his fingers around it and took it out, walking silently along the hallway now toward the gauzy light, listening to water running in the rain gutters and gurgling out the downspouts into flowerbeds. The still air smelled of long-empty perfume bottles and dust. As he drew closer, the open door revealed more of the room—a bureau dresser, a flowered bedspread, the closed door of a closet.

  He stood still in the doorway, the source of the light still hidden from him. The bed was made, the room absolutely silent. He stepped inside, looking across the foot of the bed at the wall, where there hung an ornate mirror, framed in gold leaf. The source of the light, not a reflection, lay somewhere within the mirror…

  Leave, he told himself, knowing abruptly that there was nothing in this house that he would be happy to find, although that had been true when he had driven into the neighborhood two hours ago. He stepped farther into the room, clutching the paperweight, the mirror reflecting the edge of the bed and the bureau beside the closet door, which, he realized, stood open a couple of inches, so that he could see the clothing hanging inside. He couldn’t force himself to look back at the actual door, but moved forward to see further into the mirror, the view of the room expanding. He stopped when he saw the side of the woman’s face as she turned toward him, the mirror quickly reflecting only the back of her head so that he couldn’t see her face at all, and he realized that she must be looking at him or through him, as if she sensed that he had entered the room. His own image in the mirror was simply a shadow.

  He darted a glance downward at the empty bed, then behind him at the tightly shut closet door. The rain was letting up, and it occurred to him that the thunder had ceased some time ago, the storm passing away. The light in the mirror began to wane even as the thought came into his head, and in a sudden panic that it would flicker out and leave him in darkness, he stepped forward, looking straight into the mirror.

  Beside the woman, sitting on the edge of the bed, was the reflected image of Michael’s father, his face drawn, his eyes half shut. He raised his head now, as if to say something to the woman, but looked past her in Michael’s direction, recognition, shame and bewilderment coming into his face. He opened his mouth as if to speak, perhaps to explain himself, but Michael heard nothing but the rush of blood in his own ears as he hurled the heavy paperweight into the mirror.

  The darkness was abrupt, the light having gone out of the broken mirror, and the night outside silent but for the sound of rain dripping from the eaves and bushes. Michael groped his way out of the dark room and down the hallway without looking back, pushing the window open, climbing through, and shutting it carefully behind him. He crossed the street and locked the door to his parents’ house without going back in, walked to the curb, and got into his car, where he sat breathing heavily for a moment, compelling himself to focus on the unfamiliar instrument panel and the steering wheel. He started the car, switched on the headlights, and pulled away, looking straight ahead, realizing that he had left the light on inside the house, the mail on the chair. He signaled carefully at the corner despite the street’s being empty, deciding not to go back.

  Two blocks away, when he pulled into freeway traffic, the tires humming on the wet asphalt, his cell phone rang. He looked down at the display and read off the number, realizing in a confused flood of relief and regret that it was the nursing home calling.

  Haunted places: An Afterword

  [by James P. Blaylock]

  THESE STORIES CAME to be written under curious circumstances—a strange sort of harmonic convergence that’s unlikely to reoccur. Their existence involves, in a roundabout way, one of the coolest things that has happened to me in my writing and teaching careers, both of which have been going along happily for thirty-some years now. Eight years ago, when my son Danny graduated from the Orange County High School of the Arts, I was full of the predictable spirit of celebration, but I was equally full of a nostalgia for good things coming to an end, and in a rash moment I pointed out to Ralph Opacic, the Executive Director of the school, that what the school needed was a creative writing program. Somehow, within the next thirty seconds, I had agreed to put one together, to plan a curriculum, and to find teachers. I called Tim Powers and coerced him into collaborating, and when the school reopened in September, forty creative writing students appeared with high expectations. By then I had signed on to direct the program with Tim as master teacher. I’ll give it three years, I assured myself, eight years ago. By now we’ve got 120 students, a ten-teacher faculty, a cool basement library, and an award winning literary magazine.

  One afternoon during the second week of school when we first opened for business, I visited the 7th and 8th grade class just to put in an appearance. I planned to say something clever, welcome the kids to the Creative Writing Department, and then drift away. One thing led to another, and I found myself chatting about metaphor in what I hoped was an interesting manner. A small, red-haired, freckle-faced girl raised her hand. She had glittering ivy leaves twined into her hair, as if she had ridden in that morning on a school bus from Oz. She’d been reading the poetry of Adrienne Rich, she to
ld me, and was particularly happy with “Aunt Julia’s Tigers,” and it seemed to her that Rich was using metaphor a little bit differently than what I’d been talking about. She went on to explain….

  It’s a sobering moment when you realize that you’ve just been taken out by a twelve-year-old. It was an eye-opening moment, too, and pleasantly so. This twelve-year-old actually read and wrote poetry, and she liked the poetry she read, and she understood it, and she liked to talk about the craft of poetry, too. Apparently I wasn’t in Kansas any more.

  Back out in the hallway I ran into Tim. “Watch out for this little red-headed girl who wears strange hats,” he told me. “You won’t be able to fool her.” It turned out that she wasn’t the only student who we wouldn’t be able to fool. I catch the students reading Joyce and Faulkner and Powers and Philip K. Dick at lunch. (A few weeks ago one of them asked me which translation of Proust I prefer. “The good one,” I said, and then pretended that I had a vital appointment to keep across the street at Pop’s Café.) They’re equally likely, of course, to be reading J. K. Rowling or Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. And all of them are guilty, heaven help us, of writing without being told to. In fact, like writers everywhere, they’re sometimes even more likely to write when they’re not told to than when they are. Tim runs a Wednesday afternoon club called the Charmed Quarks. Students chat about physics and poetry, although like healthy kids everywhere, they also come for the food, which Tim hauls in in giant grocery bags from Trader Joe’s. When I get back from the noon Directors meeting there’s nothing left but a couple of sourdough crusts lying on a plate next to Asimov’s Guide to Science or The Collected Poetry of A.E. Housman.

  I point all this out to explain why I’m happy to be a teacher, and to reveal that my students are fairly extraordinary. The three young writers who launched these stories are thrilled (I’m pretty sure) to be published in a volume as elegant as this, but I’m not so sure they understand that I’m equally thrilled. In fact, I’m stoked.