House of Darkness House of Light

by Andrea Perron

  After the Flood

  Be quiet listen to the voice of Earth—she cries in squalls

  wailing like a baby torn from her mother’s arms

  tears from places dark and deeper still

  than water rushing over banks

  traveling as tributaries crooked sprawling jagged ruts

  splayed like fingers reaching out to grab and hold

  to save what is forsaken to the storm

  gouging paths through woods of oak and birch and maple

  seeping into open wounds veins split and seething

  sliced across a humbled landscape

  countryside crippled drowning begging for mercy

  each drop a mournful plea

  weeping for her mother, rushing to the river

  there to reunite on a journey to the sea.

  It was a tragedy at the time, a loss sustained or so it seemed. Earth healed. Requiring only one full season to restore itself, no trace of the ravaging flood remained. No open wounds or visible scars left upon the land, no longer torn and serrated. Instead, it appeared as it had been before a super storm took its toll. In many respects, it was even better. Cleansed, scoured by that violent, destructive force with no remorse for the damage done, this land was reborn, as the phoenix rising. If only human beings knew how to heal as efficiently. Nature has an answer for every question. One need only know where, how to look. Andrea was right. Nothing was the same. Nothing is ever the same. In the same way she’d seen the stress washed away from her father’s face as he submerged himself in a shallow pool at the river, she witnessed the aftermath of the storm. The damage done was naturally restored in no time at all, not a trace of what she had once perceived, believed to be irrevocable harm done. Perceptions changed once she began to evolve with the place. She began to see the world differently. As Marcel Proust stated, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

  ***

  As the water from that geyser rushed as a raging torrent down the hillside toward the Nipmuc River, the stone walls created a natural barrier, halting its momentum, at least slowing it enough to form a big puddle at the base of the hill, detained by the porous dam. Everyone saw this happening. The girls ran down to toe dabble, then slosh around in the freezing cold water at the height of summer: a social experiment in extremes. They’d screamed like girly-girls do, laughing and splashing each other until they were soaked through to their tender young skin. Shivering in the sunshine, they all ran home to change. By the time they returned to the spot the pond had changed, too. The water had dispersed, trickling down a well-worn path then over the bank into the river, gravitating back to its elemental source, so to merge and converge with its essential self. A natural confluence occurred. This was the year when the grass was greener on the same side of the fence, at the foot of the hill, the beneficiary of a massive flood erupting from deep within the planet.

  John O’Donohue wrote: “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” His insight was shared by young ladies as they learned powerful lessons about the stream-of-consciousness. A clear understanding came to each member of the family as each, in their own time, grew with this place where they had settled. They evolved like the land and came to comprehend the essential nature of things, including the realities of the river. There were natural and supernatural consequences for those who’d visited their secluded place in the country. The property was an open door to an extraordinary spiritual experience, different every day. It had personality, a way about it, unlike any other place. Perhaps it was because of its ancient, tragic past. The spirits have their own stories to tell. Indian children were all frolicking in a once open field, one which would, centuries later, become the meticulously planted pine grove. It was truly inexplicable. These same little souls played together at their creek, emerging from the woods to explore the water’s edge. Something killed them. Was it another flood… in another time? Had they been swept away doing what children so foolishly do, standing too close to the chasm? The sad but real truth is that children die because of their own curiosity, mesmerized by this incredible world which offers so much to explore. Adults criticize children in many ways, particularly because of these irrational risks they take; usually the same risks those adults took when they were kids. It is amazing that anyone survives childhood. Accused of thinking of themselves as immortal souls, it may well be all souls enter the world with an insatiable curiosity for where they are and memory of where they’ve been. Are human beings born knowing where they come from, born carrying an imprint of the past? If ancient memory exists, does it wash away with time as rushing water smoothes a stone or does it become deeply buried, embedded with age, like an artifact in the Earth? Does an influx of new information suppress their previous inborn knowledge or is it intrinsic to the mind, accessed only if that door is opened by contemplative means? It’s possible. Anything is possible.

  ***

  The Perron family was drawn to a river’s edge. Curious children observed their parents playing like kids. Longing to join them, to play there together, it was not long before it would become a second home. Adults watched as their reflections mirrored a newfound youth in the fountain, as stress washed away with the obviously restorative qualities of the placid pool. It was magical. Long after the farm had been sold and the Perrons had relocated to a far safer place, their children would return to their river. They would explore those well-worn paths and the promise of eternal youth in its darkest depths. As adults, they’ve dangled their legs from the bridge then dabbled their toes in the water again. Some have returned time and time again, there to revisit the past, to gather up stones and sip the sacred nectar from languid pools filled with memories and the pebbles of Middle-Earth, a place where they are free to pause and reflect on a childhood riddled with the supernatural wonders of Mother Nature at her best and worst, blessing and curse. One thing is certain. They staked a cosmic claim to land long ago, maybe longer than they know.

  “Only in quiet waters do things

  mirror themselves undistorted.

  Only in a quiet mind is

  adequate perception of the world.”

  Hans Margolius

  ~ Stillwater Mill ~ Harrisville, R.I. ~

  “The leaf has a song in it.

  Stone is the face of patience.

  Inside the river there is an unfinished story

  and you are somewhere in it

  and it will never end until all ends.”

  Mary Oliver

  ~ Round Top Road submerged ~

  release the hounds!

  “The irrationality of a thing is no argument

  against its existence, rather a condition of it.”

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  It was a peaceful evening. Everyone had settled in for the night. Gathered together in the parlor to watch an old movie, the classic film Carolyn insisted they needed to see, turned out she was right, as usual. Gone With the Wind was a beautiful but heart-wrenching film. Their mom talked them through it, explaining the history of that era, telling her children about all the wonders of Georgia with all its Southern charms. Even Roger, a history buff himself, listened attentively to a lesson. It was one of those times they remember, not because of the natural inclination to enjoy popcorn and a movie but because of the supernatural activity about to be unleashed. When such episodes occur there’s a tendency for images of an event to solidify, setting up like concrete in the mind, poured through the eyes of beholders, even if they see nothing at all. As a pause for reflection, the intermission wasn’t quite long enough.

  Timing is everything in life… and death. As William Tecumseh Sherman began marching his troops into the city of Atlanta, burning everything along their bloody route, the shattering sound exploded from the cellar. It was loud beyond description, like the horns hunters blow as they release the hounds and begin their hunt of a fox on an all-consuming run for its life. A familiar image from
previous movie night excursions through time, they could all visualize the men in their fancy red coats and funky hats riding their horses, jumping the fences of a proper British pasture, in pursuit of the prize. The house shuddered. Floorboards vibrated. China rattled in the hutch. The cats hissed and hunched and bared their fangs. Two dogs were instantly up on their feet howling and growling. Roger was half way down cellar stairs. For every action, there’s a reaction! Barking. Yelling. Crying. Shouting. A horn blared again, louder, as if it was actually in the parlor, magnified a hundred fold. Terrified children clung to their mother. Both dogs were frantically barking, growling menacingly at the cellar door. They suddenly cowered to the floor, whimpering instead. Jennifer and Pooh Bear were fiercely protective of their family, as devoted as dogs come. They were fearless creatures and yet, there they were, crawling like wounded puppies toward the children, seeking their protection as a creature comfort in the midst of madness. Someone powerful had silenced them. Both of the dogs were trembling uncontrollably.

  Pervasively negative energy filled their farmhouse. It was oppressive. The horn sounded a third time. The ladies-in-waiting could hear their champion below, bellowing atrocious language at pique volume, ordering this intruder to leave the premises immediately; unaware his threatening, rather indelicate hyperbole was feeding the negativity as a symptom of his own fearfulness. He was the one who went bravely to the source, into the belly of the beast: the cellar. Intending to expel the culprit, he was inadvertently providing it with energy. The air was heavy, darkening with a presence no one could see but everyone felt as the clash of opposing forces occurred. Carolyn began to pray aloud. The children listened as their mother implored God for some act of divine intervention. The words she uttered were juxtaposed against stark imagery of destruction and death: flames and chaos exposed on a television screen. As the scene of devastation exploded across the glass, five children found themselves staring at it in awe, while still in the midst of some turmoil of their own. War: their battle being waged against an invisible enemy, little wonder they all remember what film they were watching that night when the farmhouse erupted in vile sounds from below… part of the new paranormal, a surrealistic impaling of memory. None of them ever hear a reference to the epic film without thinking of that equally epic night; an automatic response, reflexive in nature, like dad leaping from a chair or dogs leaping to their feet.

  SILENCE! Roger had suddenly stopped cursing. It became deathly quiet, dead silence from below. Carolyn turned off the television as they listened and waited. What just happened? Was it over? Where is daddy? April tugged at her mother’s sleeve, her pleading eyes asking these questions. There was no answer. Mom had no idea how to explain something that she could not comprehend. Whispering only a few comforting words she could conjure up to ease April’s distress, “It will be all right honey” was all their mother could muster in the moment. Of course, she didn’t know if it was true or not; she had to say something to pry them from its evil grip at that prickly spur of the moment, what a good mother does when her children become scared. Then, expressing her wishes to Mary, as one mother to another, on behalf of these children, she knew what transpired was inexplicable and had no confidence it was over. It was something wicked, of that she had no doubt. A force to be reckoned with, what she dreaded most of all. Waiting was as surreal as those sounds. Everyone feared for the master of the house, the man of the family.

  Roger practically ripped that cellar door from its ancient hinges. He went flying down the hatch into the dark, dank hole, in rapid and rabid pursuit of an intruder in his house. The ensuing confrontation was audible, if one-sided, like listening to someone fighting over the telephone. When the harsh noises quite suddenly subsided, then began the most hair-raising time lapse of all. Nobody knew who to expect or what would happen next. Huddled beside each other in the middle of a parlor, frantic females shivered and shuddered with anxious anticipation, awaiting a father’s return. The room turned colder as stench filled the air, mingling with the distinct smells of the cellar. He had left the door wide open on this intrepid journey, as an inadvertent invitation. The farmhouse remained eerily quiet, even though everyone could hear the pounding of their own hearts, the pulse of life beating within the bodies of mortal souls surrounded by death, immersed in the essence of immortality.

  A few minutes later, footsteps were heard creaking up the cellar staircase, slowly ascending, as if every step taken was laborious, weighted down with wonder. Roger emerged from the cellar door, as white as the sheet of paper on which these words are printed, a ghastly, ghostly shade of pale. He nearly glowed with the dark cast of enlightenment. So what the hell had he seen? Appearing stunned, he stepped off the landing into the front hallway then turned to look at his family. Without saying a word he closed the cellar door, leaving the alcove light on. A wounded warrior, what had the brave beholder witnessed in the cellar? Carolyn went to her husband. They sat together in the dining room. Obviously traumatized, so vulnerable, Roger appeared to be elsewhere, lost in thought, asking questions of himself… no answers in sight. Carolyn recognized these all-too-familiar symptoms as the aftermath of any supernatural encounter. The man was wearing his fear as a facial expression, especially in the eyes, fixed intently on the edge of the table.

  “The woodshed door… is open.” Roger bowed his head and whispered his words. “It’s off the hinges.” He looked into Carolyn’s eyes for confirmation, revealing too much of himself in the process. She heard him. “It was lifted then thrown against the wall, about twenty feet away.” Of course she knew what it meant: an act of war. It was a blatant show of force, an intimidation tactic of an unholy presence in the house. No human had lifted that door. No human could. It was all he would say aloud. His eyes said the rest. He had been courageous… but not fearless… not anymore.

  During the few seconds they conversed, at the point of mutual realization, that foul odor receded, evaporating from the air as their dwelling warmed up. Almost instantaneously, balmy summer breezes swirled and swept through the home, cleansing the premises; the prevailing winds of warning. An evil force literally flexing its muscles had finally fled. Joining their parents at the table, the ladies who had waited so patiently were hoping for some insights of their own, a proper explanation of what happened. None was forthcoming. Destined to remain as perplexed as their parents seemed to be on the matter, an all-too-common sense of paranormalcy was pervasive, as a chill invading their airspace. They had seen his face as their father’s deeply disturbed eyes gazed downward, at a fixed point, targeting a table. He was in shock.

  The mystery remained. Daddy divulged nothing. Instead, after awhile, he got up and returned to the parlor. The rest of the family followed and they all resumed watching the movie. A “fake it ’til you make it” strategy employed, a sense of normalcy was restored. As their dogs finally settled down and fear began to subside, no one could concentrate, distracted by the thought that it might happen again… whatever it was that happened. The girls were still too apprehensive to go off to bed. Everyone remained on edge during an evening which had been so rudely interrupted. Without order or consent weary troops hunkered down with dogs for the night on a sofa and loveseat… lights on.

  All’s well that ends well, or so they supposed. Five children were not yet aware of the fact that something exceedingly powerful removed the massive solid oak door in the cellar. They were not yet privy to vital information their mother and father possessed, quietly fighting to absorb. They had no inkling of the significance of this event or its impact on the two adults charged with their protection. Quilts and pillows gathered, dogs at their feet, the girls were watching Atlanta burn to the ground as they fell off to sleep.

  The cellar door to the woodshed did not open from the woodshed. It was accessible only through the cellar where it had remained locked, bolted from within. Secured as such, there was no other access to the cellar from outside their house. Whatever opened that door had done so from inside the house. Carolyn knew i
t. Too heavy for one man to move, it commanded the strength of several just to budge it. As a practical matter it was practically impossible. Roger could not fathom how much superhuman strength would be required to literally lift it off its hinges and send it sailing through the air. What brute force would be necessary to pick it up then prop it so many feet away from where he’d found it laying lopsided, up against the granite wall? No damage done to the door, as if it had been gingerly handled, it appeared to be merely tossed aside as an afterthought. Roger had a few afterthoughts of his own. It was a struggle, difficult to discuss decades after the fact; another hair-raising adventure remains much a mystery. Inquiring minds gave up asking long ago until recently, when the episode required inclusion in a memoir. Delving into the depths of his consciousness as he’d done that fateful night, racing down a cellar hatch to vanquish an intruder, he told what he could of this story with his usual stoic style then he suddenly stopped. The sounds of silence. As he began to clear his throat, choking back tears, he turned away from his eldest, attempting to regain his composure. Rattled to the core, he could not speak.