Terror Incognita

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Sometimes Jane would stand at the spot where it had arrived, holding her husband’s hand. There they would both look out across the black lake, staring at where the island must lie, as if hoping the mist would part, sunlight would beam down upon it. But it remained cloaked in its winding sheet of fog. And while most of the villagers no doubt gazed out at those waters in dread, Jane and John Thistle did so with tears in their eyes, and sad smiles on their lips.

  COLLAPSED ROOF

  Ned Corben’s garage was really just a roof that connected one side of his house to one side of a dilapidated shed his grandfather had once used as a workshop. There were no support columns, because after all it was meant as a garage. For years it hadn’t even had a back wall, until his grandfather finally put one up a few years before he died, at which time the house had been left to Ned’s parents. Now that they had moved to Florida, the house belonged to Ned. But whether out of subconscious premonition or not, he had never used the garage as anything but a storage place for the lawn mower and the bags of trash waiting to be taken to the dump on Saturday.

  Tonight he had been watching TV, rocking in the wicker rocker, cocooned in a blanket and drinking a beer, when he’d heard a terrific crash as if a tree had fallen. He had been watching a program that purported to document real life encounters with angels, re-enacted dramatically. Some of these encounters had more the flavor of ghostly visitations than what Ned would imagine a visit from an angel might be like, and he had found himself wrapping his nest of blanket more tightly around him, and wishing he had left more lights on in the house before he settled in to watch TV. It had still been light then. He had been watching for hours, moving only his thumb across the remote, and rocking, except for the monumental effort of getting a new beer and draining the last several times. It had been his Saturday routine since Brenda left, and lately his weeknight routine as well.

  Now it was dark, and he was unsettled, and when he heard the crash he stopped rocking. The abrupt halt stopped his heart in his chest as well.

  Had it been a tree? For the past few weeks, the snow had been unprecedented. It was nearly two feet deep in his yard, with just a tunnel of a pathway to the driveway he had paid to have plowed. Might a tree or at least a heavy bough, weighted with the snow, cracked at last under the pressure?

  He rose from the rocker and, still wrapped in his blanket, switched on a lamp. In the kitchen he found and tested his flashlight. It was dim, the batteries low. He had to thumb the switch on and off several times until he got the beam to stay as bright as it could manage. And then he went out into the back hall.

  He expected to see an angel waiting for him there, waiting just at the top of his second floor stairs, but a real angel, not one of those too-human ghosts. An angel with wings, and glowing aura, something more than human, its robes stirring in slow motion as if it stood at the bottom of the sea, which to an angel the earth must surely be like...creatures like Ned the equivalent of those ghastly fanged fish that dwelt at the ocean floor.

  There was no angel.

  An elderly couple rented the apartment downstairs from him. He seldom conversed with them or even saw them. For all their silence, they might have died weeks ago. He descended the stairs, passed by their door and switched on the outside light.

  It didn’t work.

  Of course it didn’t. Nothing worked. Not even him.

  Ned had lost his job a month ago. He had been a pasteup artist for a printing company that was bought out by a large corporation. There had been promises that he and the others in his department would be taught how to do their jobs on new computers that were to be brought in.

  The computers did come in. And most of the crew went out. Ned had been a pasteup artist for eleven years. The new owners had promised there would be no hiring of outsiders. Before he was let go, Ned saw the company hire a pretty set of twins, apparently just out of their teens, to work at the computers in his place. They could type quickly, and that was all they needed to do. How to balance a business card’s components, how to shoot a halftone, how to trap color separations were all irrelevant skills, as obsolete as chiseling hieroglyphics. It didn’t matter that the old phototypesetting was much cleaner, much nicer looking than the type churned out by the computers. Desktop publishing had, Ned felt, lowered the standards of excellence in printing. He believed the technology hadn’t caught up to the aspirations yet.

  The technology was flawed. Hyped. Like everything, from laundry detergent to love. It was a deception of perfection, a lie. A pretty distraction, like those twins who weren’t really grown up enough to have true skill, to say that they had mastered a profession. But the twins were too shy, too cute for him to hate. Much as he wanted to hate them. Much as he needed to.

  He had used all of his 401k savings to pay off his bills, so that he could survive just on unemployment until he could find a new job.

  He hadn’t tried too hard yet. But of the places he had tried, none had called back.

  He was thirty-eight years old.

  It was a good thing he had no family to support. He was divorced. That hadn’t worked out in the long run, either. Promises, promises. Promises of security, of happiness, of forevers. A deception.

  It was all like a cancer, ash gray under the pink of skin, spreading even into the most mundane, banal objects and matters.

  Two days ago, after loading up his car for the dump, he had found that it wouldn’t start. He knew nothing of cars. He was more handy putting together small pieces of paper. He had the car towed. It needed a new starter. The whole thing cost him two hundred dollars. Thank God for the 401k money...even though he had lost more than thirty percent of it to taxes and penalties.

  His kitchen faucet only trickled water lately. He would have to call a plumber. His father was good with things like that, but had never taught Ned to be. His father had never been close even when he was close, and now he was in Florida.

  Now the bulb to the outside light was out. It didn’t surprise him. It was just another symptom of the disease, like the torn shower curtain, the leak in his bedroom ceiling he had patched up with silver duct tape, the cellar staircase that sagged alarmingly under his weight, the mineral stains in his bathtub and the spider plant that was dying in his parlor. He was too disgusted to be dismayed. It was a fatalistic acceptance.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous venturing outside, into the frigid dark, the anemic beam of his flashlight barely playing across the heaped snow that had turned his long-familiar yard into a surrealistic, alien landscape.

  To his right, alien ruins lay half covered in snow.

  “Oh...that’s great,” he said softly.

  His garage roof had collapsed under its burden of snow. Just yesterday afternoon he had looked up at the roof and remembered how his father would make him climb onto it from a second floor window so he could shovel it off. He could have done that this winter, but had been afraid the structure wouldn’t support his weight. Now he was glad he had been timid about it.

  He drew nearer. The roof hadn’t fallen flat, but had actually only dropped to the ground on the left side, the right still supported, so that it formed a great lean-to. But in dropping on the left, the roof had torn the window of his grandfather’s old workshop right out of the wall, leaving a hole in its place. He would have to nail some plastic over it to keep stray cats and skunks out of the workshop. But that was the least of his problems.

  How was he supposed to deal with this? How to bring the roof down completely, and then, how to break it up and dispose of it? He, who could barely hang a picture without making a frustrating major project of it? He surely couldn’t afford to pay others to do it for him.

  What would his neighbors think, particularly the ones behind his house? Last summer, through his window screens, he had overheard them bitching to friends about how awful his house looked, long unpainted, the eaves full of holes squirrels popped in and out of. Last summer, he had found a gift on his rickety front porch: a basket full of weeds.
He had no doubt that his neighbors had left it as a comment upon the lawn he hadn’t mowed in weeks. But his lawn mower had broken down halfway through the summer.

  He craned his neck to see if the back wall of the garage had fallen into the neighbors’ yard; he didn’t dare climb into that half-collapsed cave for a closer look. He could easily imagine them suing if so much as a splinter had dropped onto their property. To his relief, he saw that the back wall remained standing. He had at least been that lucky.

  It was disorienting seeing the structure fallen like this. He had played in that garage as a boy. Parked his bike in there as a teenager. He used to set up targets in there, against the back wall, to shoot with his BB gun.

  Now, it lay crushed. Was the rest of the house so weak? Would the whole of it cave in upon itself like this next winter? Next week?

  There was nothing he could do tonight. Not that there was anything he could do tomorrow. Already accepting this latest development, Ned began to turn back toward the house. As he did so, his eyes swept the side of his grandfather’s workshop again. Yes, tomorrow he would have to put plastic over that...

  ...window...

  There was someone in the window.

  The figure was gone in a blink. When he swept the weak flashlight beam there, he saw nothing but a gaping hole, black as a bottomless pit, like a portal opening to the vastness of space.

  But he had glimpsed something. A figure, apparently nude. All white against the dark, and softly luminous. Skeletal. With great black skull socket eyes...

  A ghost.

  His grandfather’s ghost, perhaps. Jolted out of the ether at the destruction of the garage, peering out mournfully from his old workshed at the damage...

  Ned wanted to hurry back into the house. Pretend that he hadn’t seen that apparition, that his peripheral vision had tricked him. But his curiosity was strong, and so was his anger. Because maybe it hadn’t been a ghost, but some stranger, some teenager who had entered the unlocked shed. Some years back he had surprised two contractors, working on a house in the neighborhood, who were suspiciously peering through the shed’s window. It might be something like that. Someone who had been attracted by the dramatic crash, and been tempted to snoop.

  Ned had guns in the house. But if he went in to get one the stranger might flee. It had no doubt seen him notice it, and ducked out of sight.

  There was no time. Ned moved closer to the workshop’s door, having to wade into deep snow where he hadn’t bothered to shovel.

  With one hand he pointed the light, with the other shoved the old door open.

  He expected his grandfather to be standing there before him, at that moment. Tall, lean, smiling, his gray hair stirring lazily as if he stood at the bottom of the ocean...

  Instead, he saw only various depths and shades of gloom. Leaning boards. Stacked, broken furniture. The long workbench that ran along the wall where the window had been wrenched away.

  A little snow here and there where it had sifted through the holes in the roof.

  No grandfather. No ghost. No teenager or contractor. Ned began to withdraw from the threshold. And heard a tiny creak.

  A cat? Merely a board he had displaced under his weight? He aimed the flashlight down toward the floor.

  And then he saw the face peering out at him from the corner of the room, back in the dark, sheltered in the collection of scrap wood like an animal in its den. It glowed more dimly even than the flashlight. A pallid white glow, just enough to make the figure look fuzzy, slightly out of focus.

  Those gaping skull sockets he had glimpsed before were not hollows, but huge convex eyes, blank as those of a shark. There was little more to its face than that black unreadable stare; the nose and mouth were unfinished, just afterthoughts. Its head was hairless. The one hand he saw, its fingers curled over the edge of an old baby carriage, was impossibly long, as if it possessed more joints than a human hand.

  “Jesus!” Ned gasped.

  Either his exclamation or the light rousted the entity from its hiding place. Its burst out into the open, leaped onto the workbench, nimble for such a tall scarecrow of a being. It scarcely made a noise, didn’t disturb a single rusting tool or jar of screws on the bench. Hunched, it seemed to be racing along the workbench toward him, and in terror, Ned whirled and plunged out into the night.

  His legs sank into the snow and after only two steps he had fallen, twisting around to crash onto his back, jerking his right ankle painfully in the process. The wind yanked out of him, curling in the air above his head, he could only gaze in horror as the skeletal apparition scampered out of the gaping window. He realized then that the window had been its destination, and not his throat. He continued to stare as the being raced across the slanted roof, toward the back wall, and dropped away, presumably into the neighbors’ yard. For one crazy moment, Ned felt dread that the creature might do some damage to their yard that he would be blamed for.

  It was gone, and at last he struggled to his feet. The flashlight was gone, dropped and no doubt buried in the snow. He didn’t linger to look for it, instead made his way back to the house as quickly as the snow and his twisted ankle would permit.

  Back inside his second floor apartment, he locked and chained the door, put on most of the lights, and then went to load his .357 Magnum, a chrome-bright nickel-plated revolver with a four-inch barrel. He kept his guns in the spare bedroom, which he and Brenda had mostly used for storage, and he had left the lights off in here. As he pushed the revolver’s loaded cylinder back into its frame, he peeked around a window shade into the yard below.

  The snow all around seemed to glow slightly luminous in the night. Alien landscape...

  Perhaps, he considered, that thing had been the straw to break the camel’s back, creeping across the garage roof, causing it to fall. Perhaps, even, its craft had silently, stealthily alighted upon the roof—collapsing it—and had then whisked itself away in alarm, leaving one of its small crew stranded behind...

  As Ned peered out into the murk, he saw a flitting pale form duck from behind one dark tree in his yard to another. The trees were slender, but then the being was slenderer still. He watched the second tree for a long time, his gun clenched in his fist so tightly that the checkered walnut grips ended up leaving an imprint in his palm, but the figure didn’t emerge, and at last Ned gave up, withdrew from his watch.

  He didn’t sleep much that night, however. He just rocked in his chair, wrapped in his blanket, watching TV. But in place of the bottle in his hand, he kept the Magnum. He must stay alert. He couldn’t afford to muffle his senses, let down his guard. They might yet try to take him away. They had no doubt come to do just that...

  * * *

  The next morning, bleary-eyed, he ventured outside again. He even dared approach the workshop so as to close the door he had left open in his flight. In his quick glance inside the shadowy shed, he saw no crouching figures gazing out at him. He then covered the window hole with a large trash bag, pinning it in place with numerous thumb tacks.

  He detected no prints of the creature in the snow across the slanted roof, but it had snowed a little during the night, his car lightly veiled in the driveway, and the creature wouldn’t have left deep prints anyway. It couldn’t weigh more than a bare skeleton, and besides its cadaverous frame, it had had that blurry, insubstantial look, as if its cells were made of ectoplasm, as if the thing were visiting here from another dimension, but only half here, maybe the rest of its essence back on its own plane, whatever and wherever that might be.

  Ned ventured out for milk, bread and a few videos, but made sure he was back well before dark, and he checked every room of his apartment carefully for any invaders who might have entered during his absence. Satisfied that he was alone, he locked himself in. By the time night fell, he had loaded two other pistols and a rifle. He hid one pistol in his bedside chest, one in the top drawer of the microwave cart in the kitchen, and the .22 rifle with its thirty-shot banana clip he pushed under the couch. This
way, no matter what part of the house he might be trapped in by an intruder, a weapon would be close at hand.

  The Magnum he kept with him.

  * * *

  By nightfall, he was nestled in the wicker rocker, watching one of the videos...peripherally aware of the window covered by curtains and drawn shade just by his elbow, but not peeking out of it for fear of what he might see lurking down in his yard.

  In the adult movie, two actresses who were supposed to be sisters were acting out an incest scenario. Ned’s rocking rhythm was almost an unconscious complement to their mounting passions, the squeaking of the wicker a sound effect for the bed they writhed upon.

  Ned imagined what it would be like if those young twins from work were to entwine their slender naked bodies for his viewing pleasure. They were much prettier than these actresses. He projected them over the women on the screen, until it was truly as if it were those actual sisters he was ogling. He imagined what it would be like to tie those sisters together into artificial Siamese twins, bind them into one multi-limbed exotic creature, some sensual mutation. A pet to keep. A pet to play with. And beat when he was angry...

  * * *

  He lifted his head to the realization that, deprived of sleep, he had dozed off in the wicker chair. The tape had rewound itself and a nature show was on, the volume low. A female praying mantis was twisting around and munching on the head of her copulating lover, starting with one large grape-like eye.

  A white blur at the edge of his vision attracted his attention, and his eyes flicked to the kitchen doorway even as a pale figure darted back out of his view.

  Ned’s hands scampered in his lap, clawing for the gun that had slipped from his grasp during his doze. The remote clattered to the floor. He found the pistol, lurched to his feet, nearly became tangled in the blanket as he started toward the kitchen. Already his finger was pressing hard against the trigger, on the verge of shifting it...